


All the World in Time

by Giddygeek



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode: s03e05 A Life in the Day, Episode: s03e13 Will You Play With Me?, Episode: s04e05 Escape From the Happy Place, Family Reunions, M/M, Pining, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2019-11-27 04:16:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 34,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18189665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Giddygeek/pseuds/Giddygeek
Summary: “Now you’re back, and you’re being such a miserable prick that, frankly, there are days when I think the monster was easier to live with—”“Same,” Quentin muttered. Then he shrunk back in his seat as Margo whirled on him.“You won’t get off lightly either, Q,” she hissed. “You’re not any easier to live with than he is right now. Neither one of you is dealing with your trauma—oryour ill-fated love affair—and I won’t take it anymore.”She took a deep breath and drew her shoulders back, lifting her chin. “This is it. By royal decree. Get out of here anddealwith yourshitbefore I deal with it for you.”ORQuentin and Eliot go home to meet their family.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> a) I know that there was the tweet saying Teddy's last name is Coldwater-Waugh, but I reject it. Firstly, Coldwaughter is too good and we all know it and you know that at _least_ Eliot knows it. Secondly, I think they wouldn't have gone with their own names IN CASE they ran into a Chatwin and accidentally got written into the books and caused their future-selves trouble. 
> 
> b) This fic is complete. It's over 30k words, and I'm busy and my beta readers are busy, so we're taking our time editing. However, I don't want to be jossed even more by the canon, so I'm starting to post it. It shouldn't take more than a week or two to finish editing the rest. I won’t drag out posting.
> 
> Many thanks to JanetCarter, MissPamela, Kalpurna, and longnationalnightmare for their assistance!
> 
> c) So this is roughly canon-compliant through 4.05, and becoming ever more wildly divergent with every episode thereafter.
> 
> d) I didn’t think any archive warnings applied, and while nothing in this is WORSE than what happens in canon, it is not absolutely free of things which might be triggering. Please contact me if you’d like more details.
> 
> e) This fic is a massive, self-indulgent wallow. I wanted to write something that was tied to the canon, but just _super_ soft overall, and that's what I've done. Much to my own delight--I hope you enjoy!!

“That’s it. If I don’t get a break from you mopey sad-sacks, I’m going to start another war,” Margo declared, when the awkward silence in the reception hall had gone on too long.

Quentin shifted on his throne. Eliot swirled his wine in its goblet, watching light shine through it. He said, “I don’t think there _are_ more countries to go to war with, Margo. You’re sort of in fights with them all already.”

Margo stalked closer to him, gold and white gown swishing across the floor with each stride. “I will find a way to make it work, do you understand me? I’ll go to war against raindrops. I’ll declare wars against _you_.”

She poked Eliot in the chest, then in the chin, to make him look up at her. “This is _obviously_ hyperbole, Moping King Eliot. I don’t have the money, I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the _energy_ to go to war again right now. But I also don’t have the energy to coddle the two of you and your delicate. little. fee-fees.” She poked him again, this time in his Adam’s apple, leaning close to stare into his eyes. “Take him, take the Muntjac, take a week off: I don’t care. I don't care where you go, or what you do, just get out of here. Do you understand? _Fuck_. Or I’ll _fuck you up._ ”

Eliot let his lashes fall over his eyes, leaning into the pressure of her finger against his throat. “Tell me more about how you’ll fuck me up, Bambi,” he breathed, smiling at her. Sometimes he still felt something stirring inside himself, dark and uneasy, but less often every day without the monster in his consciousness. Julia had said it might not ever go completely away: possession by gods could never be entirely undone. They left the thinnest film of themselves behind when they were drained away. It would be up to Eliot to figure out how to live with that.

If he could.

Eliot sighed, slouched away from Margo and took a sip of his wine. “Will it be worse than anything else recently has fucked me up?" he asked in something more like his normal voice. "That's a high bar, you know. What with the being possessed and murdering an _awful_ lot of innocent people—and some really nasty gods—while also having to confront the worst moments of my life.”

Margo’s lips tightened. “Which is a lower bar than thinking you were _dead_ , Eliot.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looking down her nose at him as he sprawled insolently on his throne. “Now you’re back, and you’re being such a miserable prick that, frankly, there are days when I think the monster was easier to live with—”

“Same,” Quentin muttered. Then he shrunk back in his seat as Margo whirled on him.

“You're not going to get off lightly either, Q,” she hissed. “You’re not any easier to live with than he is right now. Neither one of you is dealing with your trauma— _or_ your ill-fated love affair—and I won’t take it anymore.”

She took a deep breath and drew her shoulders back, lifting her chin. Eliot had to take a second to admire her: she looked like a high king, regal and commanding and bad as fuck in every detail. She pointed at him, pointed at Quentin, and said, bitingly, “This is it. By royal decree. Get out of here and _deal_ with your _shit_ before I deal with it for you.”

Quentin scrambled to his feet and sputtered at her. “We aren’t your subjects—I’m not going to just—Margo, we, I—we can’t just—”

“Actually we can,” Eliot said, sitting up straight and beginning to smile. An idea had been brewing in the back of his mind, but he hadn't been able to follow through: he'd barely been able to drag himself out of bed for a while, exhausted on a cellular level, and it had been a slow crawl out of a deep hole to get well enough to even consider leaving Whitespire. But if Margo was going to kick them out anyway, they might as well do something worth their time. 

He stood and reached out to grab Quentin’s hand, holding it even when Quentin scowled at him and tried to draw it back. “Come on. I’ve been thinking about something. You’ll like it, you’ll see. Thanks Bambi, bye,” and he dragged Quentin, protesting, from the reception hall.

#

“We won’t need the Muntjac, at least not for the first bit,” Eliot told Tick, who made a note, his expression sliding between obsequious and worried.

Eliot tossed clothing into a case, frowning over this waistcoat, that cravat. He’d scraped a dozen layers of skin off in scaldingly hot showers during his first few days back in control of his own body, and gotten a haircut, then let Margo pamper him with tailoring sessions and the most gorgeous fabrics she could find. It had all helped him reconnect with himself. If he’d been a bit extra fastidious since they’d driven the monster out: well, no one who’d gotten close to his unwashed body was complaining. “We’ll start with the carriage. Our first stop isn’t far.”

“I won’t be going anywhere,” Quentin said. He sat on the edge of Eliot’s bed, eyes on the floor, arms crossed over his chest. Eliot glanced at him, then gave Tick a reassuring smile.

“Ignore him. He’s going to want to go, after I tell him _where_ we’re going. Stock the carriage for, oh, two days worth of travel?" The blue pinstripe suit would be difficult to leave behind, but they'd need room in the carriage for bodi—no. That was the monster's concern, not Eliot's. _Eliot_ had his priorities in order. He opened another travelling case and carefully laid the blue pinstripe suit inside it. "We’ll resupply on the road.”

Quentin watched him with narrowed eyes. “Easier to supply for one than two. You can tell me about your trip when you get back to Whitespire.”

Tick looked back and forth between them, fretting over his notes. “Sires, while I appreciate the toll that the, the _recent difficulties_ have taken on you both, and I understand that perhaps relations between yourselves are more peaceful than I can judge by observation, I’m afraid I simply can’t be asked to supply what feels terribly like an abduction.”

Quentin pointed at him. “That’s the spirit, Tick. Glad someone has some sense around here.”

Eliot smirked and threw another scarf into the travelling case. He was feeling better than he had in weeks, frankly. Quentin would see—they’d get on the road and he would find his way back to where he belonged.

Eliot would drag him there kicking and screaming, if necessary; and _that_ wasn't the monster thinking.

“You’re not supplying an abduction, Tick,” he lied soothingly, putting his hands on Tick’s shoulders. “King Quentin and I are headed out to see our grandkids.”

Quentin’s head tilted, his mouth dropping open. “Eliot—”

Eliot pushed Tick, shocked speechless and unprotesting, out of his room. “Carriage,” he repeated cheerfully. “Two days of supplies. Be ready in two hours.” He closed the door behind Tick and leaned against it, smiling at Quentin.

“Did you think I wouldn’t be thinking about them, too?” he asked, and nodded when Quentin’s eyes grew wide. “Why not take advantage of this downtime between disasters?”

“I can’t believe it hadn't even occurred to me—but it’s a good idea,” Quentin said, dazed. “The grandkids. The grandkids are probably—Eliot, they’re _old_. Older than _us_.”

“And we are young,” Eliot said. “Young, and recovering from a _great_ deal of trauma, and a little bit sad, and we have some things to work through, and Margo is going to eviscerate us if we don’t get out of her hair. So no better time than now, right?”

Quentin shook his head. “But we can’t. Teddy—I can’t lose my father and my son so close together, El.”

Eliot breathed out, slow. In his memory, Teddy was all ages all at once: the little boy who ran to him with arms held up confidently, assured that Eliot would catch him and lift him high overhead; the young man off to seek his fortune; the steady husband; the loving dad. Alive, always, because the universe had been kind enough to take Eliot before Teddy, in Eliot’s memory.

In this reality, Teddy had grown old and passed long before they’d remembered he existed. And Quentin’s father’s death was so recent, so freshly painful. Quentin had every right to throw that warning flag. If Eliot wanted to earn back a place in Quentin’s life, he had to heed it.

He reached out and dragged Quentin close. Quentin fit neatly against him—just short enough to be enveloped, but solid enough that it felt like he could handle whatever Eliot dished out. Eliot really should have taken their perfect fit as a clue _years_ ago.

He rested his chin on the top of Quentin’s head, swaying with him, while Quentin slowly relaxed into his hold. They hadn’t been close like this for weeks, since they’d banished the monster. Eliot had made the mistake, afterwards, of assuming that because he had realized he was wrong, he and Quentin would be back on the same wavelength. But while he’d been repressing his feelings about their relationship—Quentin had been resolving his.

Convincing Quentin that he’d been right all along might be the work of another lifetime. Especially considering that he hadn’t yet convinced Quentin to let him _try_.

“I wish your dad could have met Teddy,” he said, somber. “I don’t know much about him, but I bet he’d have loved being a grandfather as much as we did.”

Quentin didn’t respond. His chin dug into Eliot’s chest for a second and then he turned his head, resting his cheek against the brocade of Eliot’s coat. His chest expanded with a slow breath, held too long.

The terrain here was so delicate. A wrong word, and Quentin might decide Eliot wasn’t taking his accumulated losses seriously enough; too much sympathy, and Quentin would scratch him like an irritable cat forced into a cuddle. The truth, the careful truth, was the only possible route, but Eliot hadn’t taken it often to be sure he could navigate it.

He thought, _be brave; be brave the way Quentin would_ ; and said, “I’d like to know what happened to Teddy.”

And then, in the interest of being _half_ as open and vulnerable as Quentin had let himself be, over and over again, he said, “I don’t _just_ want to do this because I think it’ll remind you of what you said the day we found out about our life together. I’ve always felt like he was my son too, Q. I want to know how his story ended.”

He held Quentin tighter. “But I haven’t been through what you have, with your dad. With the monster. If you _really_ don’t want to go, we can wait, or I can go by myself if you want. But I’d rather—it feels important to do it together.”

Quentin stood frozen in his arms. For a moment, Eliot thought he’d fucked up after all, but then Quentin let out a sigh. His hands clutched in the fabric of Eliot’s coat, tight enough to threaten the fabric. “All right,” he said, and held onto Eliot for another moment. When he drew back and looked up, his face was calm. Resolute. “Together,” he said. “Okay. I’ll get some clothes.”

#

The carriage came for them two hours later. It was late afternoon by then, the suns of Fillory setting, casting golden light and long doubled shadows across the landscape. The route to the cottage was as clear in Eliot’s mind as the walk between the back door and the barn of the farm in Indiana. He sat across from Q and closed his eyes and pictured every turn in the road from more than a hundred years ago as if he’d traveled it yesterday.

It was just before dusk when they arrived.

Eliot had known, when he was trapped in his own memories, that he could have spent the time reliving the lifetime he’d spent there. He could have walked through the best moments of his life with his memory of Q. He’d been tempted more than once.

It had felt wrong, though, somehow. His memory of Quentin wasn’t quite the real Quentin. Plus, the real Quentin was out in the real world fighting monsters for him. It didn’t seem fair for Eliot to wallow in memory while Quentin was in danger.

So the image of the cottage in his mind, though as fresh as the day he and Quentin had remembered it, was of the cozy home they’d lived in for decades. Their decades there were decades ago. Time had passed, and yet no time had passed, all at once.

Eliot hated fucking with the linear passage of time. It gave him a headache.

Now, as they came around the corner, the well-maintained old cottage turned out to be a tumble-down shack. Parts of the roof had caved in, and some of the windows had broken. The chimney had developed an alarming lean. The familiar gnarled trees had fallen—the tree that had been struck by lightning their first year at the cottage; the tree where they had made Teddy a swing; the tree that produced nuts that were like a cross between chestnuts and almonds—and the young apple trees they had planted were old.

The only thing that remained the same was the atmosphere: the cottage was still a shaded, protected place, leaves falling gently on the breeze.

“It still feels like home,” Eliot said, picking his way through piles of leaves. “Should we go inside?”

“I don’t want it to fall down if we open the door. And anyway, I cleaned it out before I went to live with Teddy, near the end.” Quentin rested his hand on the doorframe. “There’s nothing of ours in there.”

“Nothing but memories.” Eliot stood behind him, put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

“Memories. Yeah, I guess we made a few.” Quentin ducked his head, spreading his fingers out wide on the faded, rough wood around the door.

Eliot looked down at the nape of his neck. So _many_ memories—they spun through his mind in no particular order; their first year, their last year; Teddy as a boy and a man; the grandkids; the times they’d had loud sex on the ground outside the cottage; the first time they’d fucked in the bed they’d built with their own hands, which they’d slept in for the rest of Eliot’s life.

He wondered what Quentin remembered. He wondered if the memories felt as good and warm to him, or if the year Eliot had spent shutting him out had tainted this treasured thing.

Eliot rubbed his thumb over the nape of Quentin’s neck. Quentin jolted and turned. He looked up with startled eyes, like he’d been drawn deep enough into whatever he was remembering that he’d forgotten Eliot was with him.

Eliot didn’t move away, leaving Quentin trapped between him and the cottage. Maybe Quentin had gotten used to being alone, but he wasn’t anymore. Eliot wanted to take every opportunity to remind him of that.

He smiled down at Quentin and put a hand on the door, leaning closer. “Do you remember the time we fucked against this door?”

Quentin raised an eyebrow at him. “We both got splinters. You whined for a week.”

“Two weeks,” Eliot corrected him. “You never wanted to do it again.”

“Can you blame me?”

“No,” Eliot murmured. He touched Quentin’s cheek, dragging his fingers gently against the grain of Quentin’s stubble. “I’m just remembering you.”

Quentin tilted his head, let his cheek rest in Eliot’s palm for a moment. “I remember you, too,” he said. They stood like that for a moment, lost in time, before Quentin put his hands on Eliot’s chest and gently pushed him back.

“Come on,” he said. “I want to see if there are any tiles left. I want—I want something to take with me.”

Eliot let him lead the way to the mosaic, buried under a thick layer of leaves. They knelt together and brushed the leaves away, finding a lot of crumbled, color-faded pieces of tile, and a few that were whole. Quentin carefully bundled the whole ones together and tucked them away in his pack, and then stood. He turned in a slow circle, dusk through the trees painting his skin gold and blue, his eyes closed. Eliot watched him, heart aching.

“It’s almost hard to keep it straight,” Quentin said, tentatively. “When are we? Are we now—or are we then? Has this happened yet, or—”

“Yes,” Eliot said, and Quentin opened his eyes and smiled. Eliot reached out a hand to take his pack, and Quentin let him. They went back to the carriage, to the horses stomping and shifting, the driver half-asleep on his perch. Eliot woke him and gave him directions, and they climbed back inside, one on each of the benches.

“We should fix it back up,” Quentin said as the horses trotted away, the carriage jolting over ruts in the barely-used track. “You know. It’s not too far from the castle. We could use it as a retreat.”

“A love shack,” Eliot said.

Quentin darted a cautious look at him, then away. “Your words, not mine,” he said, and dug through his pack for a tile, turning it over and over in his hands as the carriage took them through the woods to Teddy’s village.

#

There was only one place to stay in the village: an inn on the outskirts. It had grown over time—the whole village had grown, becoming something much closer to a town. They didn’t arrive until after dark. The streets were quiet but crowded with new houses. Their carriage rolled over gravel instead of mud.

“Sophisticated,” Eliot murmured. He took Quentin’s pack and tossed it over his shoulder as Quentin scrambled down from the carriage.

Quentin quirked a smile at him while he stretched, twisting his spine. The ride in the carriage had been rough. Eliot was going to teach the Fillorians about how to make a _real_ spring the second he had time to bring them a book and a good example.

“Urbane, compared to how we left it.”

“I like to think we were a positive influence, Q. Come on.” They passed through the inn’s narrow front door and into a clean, cozy lobby. An older man, wearing the old-fashioned wide trousers of Fillory, paired with a neat white shirt and blue apron, stood at a podium by the back wall. He turned the pages of a register. To their left, the inn’s pub bustled. To the right, a wide set of stairs led up to the bedrooms.

The man at the register looked up with a smile that widened when he took in how well Eliot was dressed, even though Eliot had gone for a simple traveling suit. “May I help you, gentlemen?”

“A room for tonight, please. We’ve come by carriage; the horses and driver will need accommodation as well.”

“Two rooms,” Quentin corrected him.

Eliot didn’t let his expression change. “Two rooms for tonight.”

“Only one available,” the man said apologetically. “Busy time of year, with the Wanderer Lost festival, and all. Of course, we could try to set you up in someone’s home; Old Mr. White Hoof’s family might be able to free a room—”

“One room,” Eliot said, victorious. Quentin sighed.

Their room wasn’t large, and the bed was just barely wide enough for two, but the floors were nicely-polished wood, and the linens smelled fresh. They washed their hands and faces and bickered over who would get what side of the bed, which sat close against the wall. Quentin lost and got stuck with the squeeze.

Just like at the cottage.

They went back downstairs to the pub. The crowd there hadn’t subsided; if anything, more people were crowding around the bar, squeezing in at small tables. Quentin and Eliot had to wait a few moments to be seated, and their meal choices were limited to a roast with vegetables, or just the roast, or just the vegetables; Eliot found the bustle and simplicity entertaining. Quentin seemed content to stay lost in his own thoughts, at least until the serving girl set their plates in front of them.

“Excuse me,” he said to her, abrupt. She paused and looked at him with a barely-hidden wince, like maybe she was expecting a complaint, or to be hit on. Quentin smiled at her, a little awkward, but examining her closely. Eliot felt the remnants of the monster take notice—the girl was too young, but pretty—and he stomped them down, paying attention to the anxious twist of Quentin's fingers on his napkin. “We’re here to—well, we have an old friend whose family used to live around here. The Lewis family? Do they still—you sort of look like—”

The serving girl straightened, her smile warming. Eliot looked at her more closely and: yes. Golden hair with the faint gleam of copper, wide brown eyes, a familiar mouth. She was a little bit tall, with broad shoulders, and narrow hips. “That’s my mother’s family,” she said warmly, and it was no surprise at all.

They’d taken fake names, just in case something happened and they changed the Chatwins’ story. Quentin had picked Lewis for C.S. Lewis, followed by a twenty minute speech explaining why and worrying about the sexist and racist implications until he’d almost talked himself out of it, and Eliot had picked Pullman, just to be a jerk. But Quentin had married Arielle as Quentin Lewis, and Teddy and his children had all inherited the Lewis name.

“Oh,” Quentin said, his eyebrows rising. He picked up his glass of wine, put it down again somewhere different, picked up his fork. “Oh, well, that’s—that’s so nice, that’s—it’s really nice to see—nice to meet you. I wasn’t—”

Eliot leaned forward, smiling, to rescue him. “Your mother’s family,” he said warmly. “Let’s see, how long has it been… would Meg have been your grandmother, then?” Meg, Teddy’s youngest. Their only granddaughter, copper-haired and naughty, the laughing heart of her family.

“My great-gran,” the girl said. “I’m named for her, although I haven’t earned the honor, really, so they call me Maggie. She was mayor by the time I was born, you know. She transformed this town. I only work in it.”

Quentin’s throat worked. “Meg was mayor? I’m, uh. You’re very young. Of course. Meg’s great-granddaughter. You have _lots_ of time to accomplish whatever you want.”

“Or accomplish nothing,” Eliot said. “I’m sure your great-gran would be proud of you no matter what.”

The girl—Maggie—laughed ruefully. “Oh, she certainly is not,” she said. “Come by the house tomorrow. You can ask her yourself.”

Quentin went white as a ghost. Eliot reached out and rested his hand over Quentin’s, gone limp on the table. “We absolutely will,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Your great-grandmother’s house. How will we find it?”

Maggie looked back and forth between them, a wrinkle forming between her fair eyebrows. “I’ll take you myself,” she said, a little slowly, like she was suddenly unsure.

Eliot turned up the warmth of his smile to reassure her that, although they were weird people, they weren’t weird people with bad intentions. “We would love that,” he said. “Name the time and place, and—is there anything we could bring her? A gift she might like?”

“A book?” Maggie said, thinking. “She hasn’t been to the bookseller in a few weeks, since she broke her leg.” She laughed again, bright and affectionate. “Bring her something new to read, and you _might_ be able to keep her from trying to run your life.”

“We’ll do that,” Eliot said, when Quentin cast him an imploring look. “Anything she’d like.”

“She likes fantasy novels.” Maggie rolled her eyes. “The melodramatic ones, where there’s no magic, no kings, no queens, no quests. Places where they run things by invention, you know? We tease her, of course, but she’s never lost the taste for them.”

“Of course,” Quentin said faintly. Eliot squeezed his hand.

“Well.” Maggie hugged her tray to her chest. “I’ve got to get back to the kitchen. I’ll come around and check on you, would that be all right?”

“We’d like nothing better,” Eliot said. She bobbed them a little curtsy and turned, weaving her way through the crowd, and they both watched her go.

“Meg’s still alive,” Quentin said when Maggie was out of sight. “This morning I wasn’t even thinking about finding them, and now I’m going to see my granddaughter tomorrow. This is unreal, Eliot. This is.” He shook his head.

Eliot was doing the math. “If Meg is her great-grandmother, we just met your great-great-great-granddaughter. Is that like, a human first?”

Quentin’s color had started to improve. “Eliot, who cares? Our Meg grew up to be a mayor. She bosses her great-grandkids around. She reads fantasy novels about, I don’t know, cars and shit. That goofy little baby—do you remember when she peed in the middle of the mosaic? And now she’s—” He laughed. “A formidable old matriarch, or whatever.”

“Our Meg,” Eliot said, and twined his fingers with Quentin’s. “Imagine that.”

#

After dinner, they went up to their room by silent, mutual agreement. Eliot watched Quentin squeeze in on his side of the bed and had a sharp sense of déjà vu, although they’d never stayed at the inn before. It was the difference between memory and reality. He’d seen Quentin edge sideways from the foot of the bed to the head, grumbling, for more than half his life. And he’d never seen it before at all.

“We’re not having sex tonight,” Quentin said sternly. He dropped onto the mattress with a cranky grunt. “I haven’t changed my mind.”

“Yet,” Eliot said. He crawled onto his side of the mattress and rolled to his side, tucking his hands under his head. He looked at Quentin steadily. “I know it’s going to take you a while to believe me, Q, but we’ll get there.”

“You keep saying ‘a while’ but I don’t know if I’ll ever—” Quentin pulled the blankets up to his shoulders. “I spent ‘a while’ learning to think of you as a friend again, Eliot. And then as. As him. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to think of you the way I used to. The way I did when we were here. The way I did when we remembered this.”

“You’re a generous guy, Q,” Eliot said. “One day, you’re gonna generous yourself right into letting me suck your dick again, and then it’ll be all over for you.”

Quentin flushed. “I don’t just fall in love at the drop of a blowjob,” he muttered.

Eliot smiled and inched closer to him. Quentin watched him with wary eyes, but didn’t object, and didn’t flinch when Eliot brushed a hand through his hair. “No. You love me for a lot of other reasons, too.”

Quentin rolled away onto his other side, facing the wall. Eliot followed him, wrapping an arm around his waist. Quentin shivered when Eliot leaned close and whispered into his ear, “The blowjobs really helped boost me over the edge last time, though. I’m not above using that in my favor.”

“What _are_ you above,” Quentin muttered.

“You, soon,” Eliot said. When Quentin just huffed out a snort, sounding more amused than anything else, Eliot snuggled close to him with a satisfied sigh. Soon. He had faith.

Faith, and plenty of time.

#

Meg was indeed a formidable old matriarch.

“Who did you say you were again?” she asked, squinting at them through an enormous pair of bifocal lenses that she held up with a thin, sturdy hand. She was all tucked up under layers of quilts, her broken leg—fell off a horse, Maggie told them with a sigh—elevated on a stack of pillows. She’d accepted the newest fantasy novel available, and a pound of chocolates, with all the dignity of a queen, and then started frowning at them.

“I’m Penn,” Eliot said smoothly, for the third time. “He’s Teller.” Quentin rolled his eyes.

“And you know which old family friend?” Meg looked between them. Her owlish, bifocaled gaze lingered on Quentin.

Eliot had subtly gotten names and dates out of Maggie on their walk over, with all the interest of a keen conman. “Your daughter Octavia’s old boyfriend is my uncle,” he repeated cheerfully; Maggie had said that Octavia, an herbalist, was out foraging for truffles with the chef at the inn. “He always used to tell me what a nice town this was, and when we found ourselves so close, we couldn’t resist stopping in to see for ourselves.”

“Harumph,” Meg said, which made Eliot beam with delight. She’d said that as a toddler, too, and they’d all laughed—they’d never known that anyone actually said things like that, and she’d come out of the womb with them. Harumph, and tsk: like she’d been born a sassy old grandmother, and he and Quentin were finally just meeting her true self. “You don’t look a bit like old Hogarth,” she said to Eliot suspiciously, and he laughed.

“Thank gods, right,” he said. He didn’t know what Hogarth looked like, but with a name like that—

Meg sniffed, and turned her bifocals back to Quentin. They stared at each other in silence for a long, awkward time.

“You want a chocolate, great-gran?” Maggie asked, slightly desperate. She held the tray out imploringly, but her great-grandmother just shook her head.

“I want the truth,” she said, and then, to Quentin, “Now, who are you really, son? You’ve got the family look—one of Miriam’s boys, perhaps, on a lark?”

“No, no,” Quentin said. He could pull off a con when he needed to, but didn’t have quite Eliot’s elegance with a lie. Meg, sharp as a tack, saw right through him.

“Not Miriam’s boys. Not Nuzzi’s. Although I’ve heard her youngest is quite the little clone of my daddy—a hero in the making, by all reports, and prone to a wander.” She frowned, working her way through a mental list. “Surely not Minette’s?” She held the bifocals up closer to her eyes. “Now, Minette’s youngest is quite the black sheep—from a _line_ of black sheep. Last I heard, that boy was learning blood magic from an old talking goat.”

“Uh,” Quentin said, panicked. “No, I haven’t, I’m not a big fan of blood magic.”

She ignored him. “Maggie, bring me Daddy’s book,” she said, and Maggie scuttled out to do her bidding.

“Daddy’s book?” Eliot asked. Quentin shot him a wild look and shook his head; whatever this was, he didn’t know of it.

Meg hummed. “My father made it a project in his final days—oh, we had his father’s instructions to deliver his note and basket of bespelled peaches and plums to High King Margo’s wedding; we had the cottage to maintain, but what else did he have of his family? His mother’s tombstone, and her picture in a locket, and nothing of his father’s except an old walking stick. So Daddy started drawing.”

Maggie came back in with a slim book. It was bound in green leather and she held it reverently, wrapped in a cloth. Meg took it from her without a murmur of thanks, and flipped to the back.

“Oh no,” Quentin said faintly, as page after page of drawings flashed by. There was the cottage as it had been. There was Arielle, drawn from the locket and then imagined in various other poses and activities: picking flowers, fishing, as the middle-aged and elderly woman she’d never gotten to be. There was Eliot, sleeping by the river and throwing Meg herself into a pile of leaves.

And there was Quentin, pages of drawings of Quentin, old and young. Cooking at his stove, a hand on his sore back. Frowning over the mosaic. Walking the path to the village, a small hand in his, a smile on his fresh-shaven face.

“Well now, if that isn’t just what I thought.” Meg turned the book around so that Quentin had to look at his own young face, drawn by his son as an old man. Quentin drew in a sharp breath, and Eliot went to stand beside him.

The old lady in the bed tilted her head at them, looking back and forth between the book and their faces. “There you are,” she said, and smiled. “Hello, Grandpa. Hello, Papa. Daddy told me I might see you again some day.”


	2. Chapter 2

Solving the mystery had given the old matriarch new life. She made Maggie go fetch two of the boy cousins—Jack and Erdo, identically stocky and quiet, wide-eyed in the face of their great-grandmother’s brisk explanation that these men were their grandparents, many generations removed.

“But that’s King Eliot,” Erdo said, and then blushed. Eliot smirked. He bet he knew exactly the kinds of things Erdo had heard about him, and where he’d probably heard them; the kid couldn’t have been more obviously queer if he was wearing a rainbow of sequins and feather boas at a Pride parade.

“Certainly is, which is how he’s going to be able to afford to complete Daddy’s last spell,” Meg said, with a gleaming little smile.

Eliot straightened. “Ah, Teddy’s what?” He glanced at Quentin, who shrugged, eyes wide with surprise.

Meg sniffed. “His last spell. The crowning achievement of his magical career, he said. Not to be attempted unless the two of you returned; not even to be looked at without you. If you’re curious about that at all—” which Eliot certainly was, and Quentin was leaning closer to Meg, fascinated—”You’ll just have to go along with my little plan.”

Quentin blinked at her. “Which… is…”

Meg patted Quentin’s hand. “Which I’d explain, if only you’d stop interrupting,” she said, before turning to her great-grandnephews and barking orders.

“Was she mayor, or Glorious Supreme Leader?” Eliot whispered in Quentin’s ear.

Quentin ducked his head, hiding the smile curving his lips. “Why are you assuming there’s a difference?”

Meg got her nephews to help her out of bed and into the living room of the charming little house which she shared, as it turned out, with Octavia and Maggie. Once downstairs—comfortably ensconced on the sofa with her chocolates and her book—she had Maggie fetch her a pair of rabbits.

“You’ll have to go fetch Isadora and Will, of course,” she said to Quentin and Eliot as they hovered over her, bemused. “Nuzzi and Minette’s youngest children. Daddy said that when you returned—if you returned—we’d need the strongest magician from each of his children’s lines to make their way to the cottage and say the words. Now, my Maggie is already here, which is lovely, but those two would be at opposite ends of the world, and—”

Eliot and Quentin shared a look. Quentin raised his eyebrows and Eliot shook his head; Quentin gestured more emphatically and Eliot sighed, rolled his eyes, played bad cop. “Sorry, Meg: Teddy left some strong magic for us? Because I’m sure you know that he wasn’t Fillory’s most talented magician.”

She shot him a disapproving look. “Daddy was very diligent. He spent the last years of his life working on this. Show your son some respect.”

“Of course we respect Teddy,” Quentin said reassuringly. “We, you know, we taught him as much as we could, we gave him—he worked hard, he really did. But you have to see where we’d be a little concerned about—what is his spell supposed to do?”

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know, but I will find out before I die,” Meg said tartly, before bending to whisper in a rabbit’s ear.

“THEY’RE HERE. SPELL TIME. FETCH KIDS,” the rabbit repeated obediently, and she sent it off with a satisfied smile.

“I’ve sent word off to their parents; hopefully Nuzzi and Minette know enough about what their kids are up to that you’ll be able to find them easily.” She fixed Quentin and Eliot with a dubious look. “Can you handle that, do you think? Should I assign one of the kids to help you? My daddy always said you were both very bright but, well.”

“No, we’ve got it,” Eliot said. “You know, you really have to meet High King Margo. You’ve got a lot in common.”

“She can come meet me—I’m certainly not traveling to Whitespire at my age, and in my condition,” Meg told him with a sniff. “Now, Isadora was always a biddable child, but quite the budding hero. You will be sidetracked by princesses in need of rescue, shepherd boys with lost sheep, that sort of thing, once she’s in your care. And Minette’s boy Will is, of course, a sullen beast who needs some good male role models. Maggie, get the map.”

Maggie, long-suffering, left the room for a moment. Meg started a list, mumbling to herself and tapping her quill against her bottom lip. 

Quentin sat in a chair and watched his granddaughter work with wide eyes. Eliot perched on the arm of his chair, hand on his shoulder, and made his own plans. They could take the Muntjac after all—finally, the adventure that Quentin had been so excited about last year. It still hurt to think of the way he’d shot Quentin down, how Quentin had curled up and taken it.

He had so much to make up for.

This trip couldn’t replace that one, of course. It couldn’t undo the damage or turn back time. But it could be a reminder that they were made for adventures together; Eliot couldn’t have spent fifty years questing with anyone else—let alone have lived with them in a tiny cottage for most of it.

Maggie came back with a map that put the final pieces together. She set it down in front of her great-grandmother, and Meg marked off where the rabbits were going: her brothers had both passed some time ago (their grandsons; long-lived but not long enough. Quentin shuddered and reached for Eliot’s hand), but each of Teddy’s three children had had three children of their own, all still living.

The nine great-grandchildren each had between two and five children, and those children had produced several great-great-great-grandchildren, some still infants, of course, but—

“This is more than fifty people,” Quentin said. “Fifty descendants.”

“I had thought we were lucky to run into Maggie, but we would’ve been related to almost anyone we met in this town,” Eliot said to Q, under his breath. “Reminds me of Indiana, except I don't think anyone here is going to punch me, and these people don't have access to meth.”

“We only have the one bad bunch,” Meg said proudly. “Oh, I could tell you a thing or two about Minette's family line, but, well, you'll find out soon enough. But the rest of the Lewises—well, one of the finest families in Fillory. And of course there are the husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends—one of my grandsons is dating a centaur, not that there’s anything wrong with that but I’m not quite sure how they refer to their relationship—and so on.”

“Fifty descendants,” Quentin repeated. Eliot leaned down to glance at his face and then hopped up off the arm of the chair. He dragged Quentin to his feet, and held onto his arm. Quentin seemed a little wobbly.

“Meg, my dear, we are very glad to meet you again and be so successfully managed by you,” he said, pulling Quentin across the room and leaning down to kiss her powder-soft cheek. “But I’m afraid you’ve blown your poor grandpa’s mind. I’m going to take him back to the inn and get him some tea and a nap, all right? We’ll be back to check in on your plans after dinner.”

Meg kissed him back, then reached for Quentin with both arms, like a child asking to be picked up. Quentin swallowed hard and leaned down to her, letting her hold onto him even as his own hands hovered above her back, as if he was almost afraid to touch her, to get too close.

“I’m so glad to see you again,” she murmured to him. She sounded younger, sweeter, a little dreamy, like she was remembering the same things that Eliot assumed Quentin remembered: her childhood, her brothers, her father.

 _Teddy_.

She pulled back and put her hands on Quentin’s cheeks, holding him in place so she could look up at him. “My father would be so glad to know that you’ve come home,” she said, with a watery smile.

That was what broke Quentin. Eliot saw it happen. Meg dropped her hands to kiss his wet cheeks, and then Eliot pulled him close, tucked him under his arm, fled the scene.

In their room at the inn, Eliot held his arms open and Quentin went without a word. He turned his face into Eliot’s chest and sobbed, silently, his breath ragged and tears hot.

“I’ve got you, Q,” Eliot whispered. “I know, I know.” He swayed in the cool, dim room, his shirt damp, Quentin in his arms.

#

They had dinner brought to their room and ate silently, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bed. Quentin was visibly exhausted.

“We don’t have to go back tonight.” Eliot took Quentin’s empty plate and set it on the tray outside the door. Quentin yawned and slumped back into the pillows, eyes half-closed. The monster stirred, eager to pounce— _no_ , Eliot thought with relief: that was _his_ desire to pounce—

“I want to see more of Meg.” Quentin smiled, but his hands twisted anxiously together. “The nap helped. I’ll be okay.”

Eliot sent their coachman back to the castle. He’d sent Tick a rabbit with orders to have the Muntjac prepared and sent to them, and got a rabbit back from Margo that yelled FINALLY. FUCK. ROYAL DECREE before it hopped off. They’d be ready to leave by the next afternoon: off to complete their son’s work. There wasn’t much time to see Meg before they left, so he nodded and followed Quentin back out into town.

The evening air was brisk. The walk wasn’t long, and they were wearing enough layers to make it bearable, but Quentin’s hand was cold when Eliot took it outside Meg’s door, catching his attention long enough to say, “Thanks for letting me do this with you, Q,” before a middle-aged version of Maggie swept them inside with a happy squeak and warm hugs. Eliot found it overwhelming to hold onto her, Meg’s daughter. He noticed that Quentin hesitated before committing to hugging her back, then held on so tight she laughed.

Meg, imperious, called out, “You give them to me, Octavia, they’ll have enough time for the young people later,” and Octavia hustled them back into the parlor, where a crowd awaited them.

It was easy to see who was a Lewis and who had married or dated in; Meg’s children and their descendants had either Arielle’s strawberry blonde hair or Quentin’s caramel brown, and almost all of them had Quentin’s eyes and dimples. Eliot towered over the lot of them.

A great-great-grandson solemnly took their coats. A great-granddaughter offered them drinks. Meg demanded they sit on either side of her, her propped-up leg like a wall between them, and she held their hands.

“The grandkids are going to take you out to the Wanderer Lost festivities,” Meg told them. Quentin shook his head, sinking back into the sofa, but she harrumphed at him. “You can’t hide out with us old ladies forever, much as we might like it. Get to know the young people. They’re excited to show you off. Oh, don’t worry, they won’t go around telling everyone who you are, although I’m sure you won’t be able to maintain your false identities for long. Go out. Have fun.” She squeezed Quentin’s hand. “You look like you could use it.”

“We could,” Eliot said, and kissed her cheek. Quentin glared at him, but Eliot ignored him. They _could_.

“That’s fine then,” Meg said, satisfied. “Now, sit you back and pay attention. I’m going to tell you all about—oh, say, everyone—while the grandkids figure out how and when they’re going to meet up, which would never have taken this long if they’d let me do it when I offered.”

Erdo sighed into the cup of tea Meg had made him take, then downed it; Maggie and Jack exchanged long-suffering glances. She was a _harridan_ , Eliot thought with delight. He loved her.

“Now, let me share all the news,” Meg said. She settled in to cover a long list of almost incomprehensible family history, detail piling on detail until Eliot stopped hearing the individual words and heard only her voice, running forever on.

When Eliot cast a glance at Quentin over Meg’s head, Q had leaned forward, listening earnestly. _Teacher’s pet_ , Eliot thought affectionately, and started planning how he’d make fun of him for it later.

There were a lot of plans to be made. They had rough destinations and knew the general location of the other two branches of the family. The kids didn’t sound like they’d be much trouble—a blood magician didn’t worry Eliot, not anymore. But what spell could possibly require three strong magicians from one bloodline? Nothing harmful, he was sure of that much. Not if it was Teddy’s work.

He could ask for a look at it. He and Quentin had taught Teddy themselves. Quentin handled the basics and the more academic spells. Eliot took on whatever higher-level magic he’d learned that they thought Teddy could handle, plus the quick and dirty spells he thought Teddy needed. He could probably identify every element, translate every piece—

Or just let this new quest unfold as it would.

“I’ve got Maggie at work on a family tree,” Meg said, winding down her long monologue. “I should have done it ages ago. I was hoping she would step up on her own. Tremendous head for history and politics, that girl, not that she’d let you know it. Now, it looks like the grandkids are about ready to collect you, so: when do you head out?”

“Our ship will arrive tomorrow afternoon,” Eliot said. “We’ll come by and see you in the morning.”

“If you haven’t drunk yourselves slovenly. If you have, not to worry: I’ll see you when you come back. No fuss about that, hmm?” She fixed Quentin with a bright, beady look. He’d been quiet and overwhelmed since—since Eliot had dragged him out of the castle, really. It was easy to see how she might assume he’d run out of town and bury his head in the sand for a hundred years before coming back to see her again.

“Um, no fuss,” Quentin said. “I’ll come back as often as you’ll let me, really.”

“Good, good.” Meg eyed Erdo, who had approached her sofa with their jackets in his hands and a furious blush on his cheeks. “You just wait one more minute,” she told him sternly. He jolted to a stop like he’d been hit by a spell.

“One more hard thing,” she said to Quentin and Eliot, tugging them in closer. “Now, I don’t know that you’ll have the time or ability tomorrow, but the grandkids will show you the way to the cemetery on your way to the Wanderer Lost. If you feel capable of stopping in before you leave, I’m sure my daddy would be glad of a visit.”

“Oh, look at the—the time—the kids are ready—” Quentin said, and shot off the sofa. He grabbed Eliot’s jacket from Erdo, realized his mistake, and tried to get Erdo to take it back and hand him the other one, which quickly devolved into a farce. Erdo looked like he was going to cry, and Quentin wasn’t far behind him.

“Maybe not tonight, Meg,” Eliot said, giving her hand one last pat. “But we’ll go see him soon. I promise.”

Quentin finally had his own jacket in one hand and Eliot’s in the other, but seemed confused about the next step; trying to put his own jacket on with Eliot’s still in his hand wasn’t working. He tried to hand Eliot’s jacket back to Erdo, who shied away like it would hurt him.

“The resemblance is so strong,” Eliot said, staring at them. “Did Quentin discover cloning while I was distracted?”

“Cloning is my favorite trope,” Meg said with delight. “I always wanted to write a—well, that’s neither here nor there. One more word of caution, before you go—”

“Meg, if you pile on one more thing right now, I don’t know that he’ll ever—”

“If you do get to the cemetery, don’t be alarmed: you’ll see your own stones there, next to Daddy’s,” Meg said quietly. “We left the markers at the cottage, of course. It just felt right to remember you down here, too, after Daddy passed.”

Eliot looked at her with grim admiration. He wouldn’t have thought it was possible to make the situation more heartbreaking, but Fillory could always find a way.

He stood and rescued his jacket from Quentin and Erdo, who looked at him with identical expressions, equally annoyed and grateful. Eliot turned to his granddaughter and gave her a bow. “Thanks for not leaving us alone out there,” he said. He shrugged into his jacket, put a hand on Quentin’s back, and followed the herd of their great- and great-great-grandkids out the door.

#

Maggie pointed out the cemetery path as they passed it. Eliot wouldn’t have said he remembered where it was before she showed them the way, but it seemed familiar.

“It would be a lot, I know,” he whispered in Quentin’s ear as they followed Maggie and the others to the festival. He tossed his arm over Quentin’s shoulder. “I’ll go if you want, but I told her—”

Quentin leaned against him. “Yeah, no. Maybe next time,” he said quietly. He looked up at Eliot but his hair was falling across his face, hiding his face, and he didn’t take his hands out of his pockets to brush it aside. Eliot kissed his temple and didn’t push. He left his arm where it was, keeping Quentin tucked close.

In his memory, the Wanderer Lost was a good party. The festival lasted for five nights, with a new maze each of the first three nights, a dance on the fourth, and quiet, candlelit dinners at home traditional on the fifth. By the time the kids went home on the first nights, the remaining adults would be completely sloshed and taking turns sending each other through the mazes blindfolded.

Or, as Eliot remembered fondly, kissing each other in quiet corners of the maze. He’d let Quentin lead him through blindfolded once, and given him a blowjob for a job well done, close enough to the exit to almost get caught. He’d blindfolded Quentin and kissed him at every turn, pushing up his shirt and putting his hands down Quentin’s pants while Quentin laughed.

But they’d missed the mazes this year. “Next year we should time our visit better,” he said, and rolled his eyes when Quentin looked at him, uncertain. “Of course we’re coming back, Q.”

“Well, we don’t have to do it _together_ ,” Quentin said. “We could go on our own if—if that was better, or whatever.”

“Spoken like a true child of divorce.”

Quentin shot him an incredulous glance. “What would you call what happened with us?”

Eliot winced. “A trial separation that didn’t work out, leading to a happy reunion?”

“Oh, for—sure, whatever, okay.” Quentin shrugged out from under his arm and walked a little faster, catching up to Maggie and her cohort of cousins. Eliot didn’t chase him, just followed them, watching Quentin’s body language slowly relax as the cousins teased each other with easy familiarity.

 _We worked_ , Quentin had said to him, with all the warmth of newfound joy. And Eliot had shot him down. They’d still worked as friends after Eliot’s stupid decision to reject him. At least, Eliot had thought they worked as friends. He hadn’t realized just how broken the situation was until Quentin had volunteered to stay with the monster. It had been easy to assume that once the flush of realization had drained away, Quentin would go back to his old self: mostly straight, mostly just Eliot’s friend.

Even though he’d known, he’d known by then that Quentin was the most loyal and generous man he’d ever met, he’d still thought Quentin’s feelings would fade like magic had when the McCallisters siphoned it.

Eliot had been operating under the assumption that because he felt fundamentally unlovable—unlovable in any real, romantic way—he would never be loved. He hadn’t even been able to take the idea that Quentin might make a sincere, lasting offer seriously because the certainty of rejection was so strong, so immediate. And that had been the mistake with the most lasting consequences of his life.

_A trial separation that didn’t work out._

He straightened his jacket, rolled his shoulders, and followed his family into town.

#

The village common had been lit with lanterns, and a dance floor laid down. A mixture of magical bonfires and heaters kept the common at a temperature almost warm enough for comfort if you were standing around, and almost cool enough for comfort if you were dancing.

Eliot was dancing.

He could coax Q out onto the dance floor for a few minutes at a time by singing Taylor Swift lyrics to the tune of whatever the band was playing. The absurdity of it made Quentin laugh and bob agreeably until he remembered that he didn’t dance. Then a descendant would pull him away—Jack for beers; Maggie to ask questions; Erdo so that he could dance closer to Eliot himself and try to copy his moves; the others for reasons ranging from silly to sly.

Eliot pointedly ignored the whispers that had started almost as soon as they arrived. It wasn’t possible to deny Quentin’s resemblance to the Lewis family, and enough people had recognized Eliot as the former high king of FIllory to make the leap to Quentin’s identity.

It was the connection that had people talking: was Quentin actually from Earth, or really just a Lewis cousin, and therefore a usurper to the throne? The Wanderer Lost didn’t usually have much political intrigue wound into the festivities, and everyone seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to make a little extra drama.

Eliot stumbled off the dance floor the third time the gossiping got loud enough to hear over the music. Quentin was standing with his hip popped and a drink in his hand, over by the bar with one of Maggie’s cousins on her father’s side—Cora? Dora? It had been difficult to keep track of the names after a while. His head was tipped down, his free arm crossed over his chest. He bit his lip as he nodded along to whatever the girls were saying. Not stressed, especially, just listening intently.

“—and that’s how my grandmother slayed the feral Five-Souled Cow,” Maggie said proudly as Eliot joined them. “Which of course had very dire consequences for the village, although she couldn’t have known that before she put it on the spit, but that did not matter to its mother, and that’s why we’re still rebuilding the clock tower—”

“Five-Souled Cow, mmm-hmm,” Eliot said, nodding attentively. “Excuse me, pardon me, just—” and he drew Quentin away.

“You have to go to his place,” Quentin said as soon as they were out of earshot of the girls. “Whoever it is you want to—to take home, or whatever.”

Eliot drew back in surprise, then straightened, indignant. Quentin wagged a finger at him—drunk, a little, tired and emotionally drained, and—and _jealous_?—“Don’t argue with me, El. I don’t care who you wander off with, but I want to get some sleep so you have to go to his place. Well, on second thought, I do care who you wander off with,” he corrected himself. “Not a single Lewis descendant, no matter how distant they are from me, you got it?”

Eliot crossed from indignant to truly affronted very quickly. Distant from _Quentin_? As if they would be any further from Eliot himself—as if he hadn’t raised Teddy as his son, treated the grandkids as _his grandkids_. Maybe the biological connection wasn’t there—but loving Teddy had rewired Eliot’s brain, and being loved by Eliot had shaped Teddy’s—wasn’t that biological in a way? And maybe they’d never gone to a Fillorian lawyer and formalized the parenting arrangement. Maybe Eliot had made a mistake when they remembered their other timeline. _Fine_. But none of that meant Teddy wasn’t as fundamentally _his_ as he was Quentin’s.

“I know I’m a farm boy from the middle of nowhere, but that doesn’t mean I screw _my relatives_ ,” Eliot snapped.

Quentin held his hands out, palms up. His cheeks were rosy, flushed with warmth and alcohol and wrath and embarrassment. “You’re right, okay? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t—that you aren’t—”

“Apology accepted,” Eliot muttered.

“Good. Great. So go wherever you want, except to the inn, with whoever you want, except—obviously—our grandkids. What about that guy, the one over there with the mask on? He’s cute, I noticed when I saw him talking to Erdo earlier, so, uh, it might—”

“He’s also the one pretty young thing who isn’t one of _my great-grandkids, too,_ ” Eliot said. He shook off the irritation with effort. He hadn’t exactly given Quentin a lot of reasons to expect fidelity, not in this timeline. Maybe it wasn’t fair to expect Quentin to know he’d play by the rules they’d established in the timeline Eliot had rejected.

He let out a deep breath. “I give him a year until he and Erdo are setting up their own cute little love nest. But no, that wasn’t why I was coming over. I know who I’m going home with tonight.” He laid his hand on Quentin’s cheek to feel how warm it was, looking into his eyes.

Quentin’s mouth quirked, an uncomfortable smile. “Yeah, okay. Nice to hear, but if you want—”

“I know what I want.” He dropped the faintest brush of a kiss on Quentin’s other cheek. He felt Quentin draw in a sharp breath and shift like he was going to reach for Eliot’s mouth, then stop himself. Eliot smiled, Quentin’s stubble rough on his lips. “I know _who_ I want,” he murmured, and pulled Quentin closer.

The difference in their height meant his hips brushed Quentin’s stomach. He felt Quentin flinch, then gather himself, press back against Eliot’s body. A bonfire burned beside them, almost too warm. A crowd of dancers swirled past, giving them space but also casting curious glances at them.

“If we weren’t already going home together, I’d ask you to come home with me,” he whispered in Quentin’s ear. Quentin ducked his head in the shivering way of someone who was overwhelmed. It made Eliot’s every instinct shout at him to follow—

But the talking animal band swung into a lively tune, one Eliot remembered from every festival they’d attended for fifty years, and reminded him why he’d gone looking for Quentin. He drew back reluctantly. “Come dance with me. You were good at this one, once upon a time, and I need to talk to you.”

Quentin’s cheeks grew even more flushed, but a wry smile curved his lips when he looked up and met Eliot’s gaze. “I was sitting it out a lot by the end. I’m not sure I remember how it goes.”

Eliot laughed. “Oh, you’ll remember,” he said, and dragged Quentin back out onto the old wooden dance floor.

#

“Now, people who are not Lewises—and some of the Lewises, I’m not sure they all got the right rabbit—are wondering about your relationship to Meg and the rest of the clan,” Eliot murmured to Quentin, twirling him around the edge of the floor.

Quentin obviously didn’t remember the steps. He watched Eliot’s feet, watched Jack spinning a girl with curly black hair and a sharp white smile, lost the rhythm of the steps and had to be hauled back into it. It was unfair of Eliot to expect him to dance and talk at the same time, but good luck getting any other privacy at a cheerfully drunken festival where they were the center of attention. “It’s good, right?” he said, and then bounced off Eliot’s hip. “Oof, ouch!”

Eliot dragged him back again and patiently walked him through another spin. “The relationship to Meg and the rest of the family is good,” he agreed. “Clearly good, and going to get better. But what is it? Are you from Earth after all? If not, who are you? If so, what are you _doing_ here?”

“Dancing with you,” Quentin said, mulishly oblivious, the way he got sometimes.

“Very badly,” Eliot said.

“Well, yeah!” Quentin held his breath through the next spin. He winced as he promptly stepped on the toes of his left foot with the heel of his right. “Are you sure this dance always had this many spins?” he asked suspiciously.

“Yeah,” Eliot said, and added another one just to fuck with him. “But I’m serious. It could be bad for us—for Margo—if people start rumors about who you are and why you’d come here. I’m not saying you have to do it, and I’m not saying it has to be now, but I want you to consider telling the truth. Let the people here know who you are. How deep your ties to Fillory really go.”

Quentin kicked him in the shin, probably on accident. “How deep do they go, Eliot?” he asked. “I mean, how deep do my ties to anything, anywhere, really go? I could disappear tomorrow and—”

This time it was Eliot who dragged them to a screeching halt. “No,” he said.

Quentin rolled his eyes, then smiled apologetically over Eliot’s shoulder at the couples who had to dance around them. “I’m not saying I’m planning on it,” he said under his breath. “I’m just saying, if I did, what difference would it make to them? To any of these people?”

“All the difference in the world to me,” Eliot said, holding him too tight.

“Well, you don’t count. You already know who I am. Can we move over a little, please? I feel bad for—for this guy in the chicken mask, his vision already seems limited, and—”

“All the difference in the world.” Eliot hauled him to the side. “Q, I’m not asking you to tell them just because I want to stop a rumor,” he said. He slid his hands up, holding onto Quentin’s face so that Quentin had to look him in the eyes. “I’m saying, tell them—okay, maybe not now, but soon—so that you can have a relationship with the Lewises. Not because you don’t matter, because you do. Not because you could disappear tomorrow, but because you can’t.”

He leaned closer. “This is your family, Q. I want you to be able to have that relationship with them.”

“I can,” Quentin said. “I will. In time. For now, I guess we just let people wonder. They can’t do anything about it if they decide I _am_ from Fillory, not without Margo’s say-so anyway, and that’s not going to happen, so what does it matter?”

A year ago, it would have been impossible for Eliot to acknowledge, but he fought against the old fear of rejection to say: “Because I want all the grandkids to know they’re my family, too. I want everyone to know that you’re my family. I want you to know how seriously I take that.” He paused. “How much I want it back.”

“You’ll always be my family, Eliot,” Quentin said, looking up at him with serious eyes. “You always were, even when—”

“Don’t give me any of that friendship-is-family bullshit,” Eliot snapped. “It might be true, but you know that’s not what I mean. I don’t want to just be, I don’t know, Uncle Eliot, with the unrequited feelings and pathetic pining. I want to be your family. I want to be your partner again, Q. I miss it. You were right. How many times will I have to say—”

He stopped. Quentin was staring; Eliot was vaguely aware that lots of people were staring. He was probably embarrassing himself, and in front of all the grandkids. Once upon a time, that would have been enough to stop him. He’d have stalked off in a huff. He’d have wasted a month of their lives being furiously defensive. The temptation was there—he was still himself, after all—but another lifetime with Quentin was more important than an old, self-destructive impulse.

He drew Quentin closer again and leaned down. “It doesn’t matter how many times I tell you,” he said, voice low, pitched just for Quentin’s ears. “Let me show you. Let me kiss you; I want to kiss you—”

Quentin leaned up and kissed him. It was fast, so fast that Eliot didn’t even have time to respond. Just a press of Quentin’s mouth, firm and frowning, against his, gone almost before it could register.

“There,” he said. “Now will you shut up about it? Magic is back, the beauty of all life is a mystery we solved, and whatever feelings we had are back in the past,--or the future, or whatever. I hate time loops. Whatever we were, we’re not that anymore, Eliot. You can’t just get it back because you—"

Eliot reeled him in, still talking, and kissed him again.

He took his time: it had been a while since he’d had the opportunity to kiss Quentin, and he wasn’t going to waste a second of it. He made a soft noise against Quentin’s lips and pressed more firmly against them, urging Quentin to part them. Quentin did, with a surprised gasp like he hadn’t expected Eliot to respond to his stupid, infuriating little kiss with something real. But it was real, all of it; the cottage, the mosaic, the family, the year of stupidity after, and Eliot wanted him to know.

He wanted everyone to know.

He angled Quentin’s head and leaned over him, into him, sliding his tongue into Quentin’s mouth and fucking him with it, as slowly and sweetly as he could manage. Quentin had always loved that—this was one of the ways that a lifetime of memories played in Eliot’s favor. He’d had decades to refine his technique. Even as an old man, Quentin had melted into a deep kiss with pleased surprise, like it had never happened before: like it undid him, opened him up and emptied him out.

He’d sometimes flailed his hands like he didn’t know where to put them, right up until the end. And—there they went. One hand landed on Eliot’s shoulder, the other stuttering across his waist like it wanted to settle but didn’t know where to land.

Eliot smiled against his mouth. “I love the way you kiss,” he murmured. “I always have. I always did, Q, I swear it,” and he kissed Quentin again, helpless against his own desires.

This time, after a long, frozen pause, Quentin’s flailing hands steadied and held onto Eliot, tight and sure.

Behind them, someone wolf-whistled. The sound broke the polite distance their audience of curious onlookers had barely maintained; the titterers, gossips and grandkids were suddenly all five steps closer and full of comments. At first it didn’t break Quentin’s focus—Eliot held onto him, wishing the crowd away, wishing he was a Traveler, wishing—but eventually the crowd got Quentin’s attention. He drew back, embarrassed, brushing his hand across his mouth as if to hide the evidence of their kiss.

“Thought you might be the king’s fling,” one girl said snidely, tossing her hair as she twirled by with an abashed boy—a Lewis boy, Eliot noted. He cast the boy a disapproving glance. Meg would hear about that.

“Thought you might be pirates,” drawled an old man in a semi-circle of other men, ranging from old to old as fuck, some of whom elbowed him, jeering. “Aww, you don’t know, the rest of you; it might be pirates, at any time!”

“River pirates,” the friend nearest him snorted.

Quentin shot Eliot a hunted look. Eliot shrugged: he cared less about river pirates than he did about kissing Quentin again.

“Thought you might be a usurper,” said the ex-boyfriend Maggie had been avoiding all night, a beefy guy with mean eyes—and, Maggie had muttered when Eliot asked, a wife at home, too.

Quentin glared at him. “I am not,” he said. His lips were pink, and he still looked kiss-dazed. He didn’t look like a usurper. He looked more like the usurper’s concubine.

Eliot was going to tell him that, later, when the time was right.

“Okay, fine. Fine, you win,” Quentin said under his breath to Eliot. Then louder, to the curious crowd: “We were, uh, the hermits.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, vaguely in the direction of the cottage. “Up at, at the mosaic. You know, the ones who solved it? That was a long time ago, of course—there was a time loop, the Chatwins had a few time—anyway, magic.”

“Can’t have two hermits living together and still call ‘em hermits,” said the old man who’d called them pirates. He took a long sip of his drink, then burped. “Can’t have two hermits and a whole great big family the size of the Lewises. That’s not hermits anymore. That’s part of the community, is what that is.”

“Yeah, a hundred years ago,” said the beefy young guy, eyeing Quentin and Eliot suspiciously. “More than. Who knows what all they’ve been up to since—I hear that the tall one was high king, and you all saw how that went—”

Eliot drew himself up tall and looked down his nose at the guy, faint sneer curling his lips. “That ended pretty well, all things considered. Mostly everyone’s still alive.”

Quentin rolled his eyes. “And what we’ve been up to since is a lot of saving magic and saving your lives. Although I guess a lot of that isn’t stuff you’d just know? We haven’t exactly been putting out bulletins.” He turned to Eliot and frowned, consternated, more wound up with every word, “Should we have been putting out bulletins? Isn’t, you know, transparency a good thing in a governing body? Should we do some kind of press release?”

“Oh, Q,” Eliot said, almost overcome by Quentin’s charming panic. “That’s just adorable. If you write a press release, I’ll make Margo hire a troupe of talking animals to reenact it in every town common in Fillory, I promise.”

Quentin pushed him back and took a few steps away, toward the light, and looked around at everyone gathered close, their avid, curious eyes following his every move. Maggie hurried toward him, and Jack, and Erdo, and the rest of the descendants; all together, they made up a formidable portion of the crowd. The old man stood up a little straighter, and Maggie’s frenemy took a step back when she brushed by him with an impatient glance.

When Quentin spotted her, he smiled; a true smile, warm and sweet. “I’m Quentin Coldwater,” he said, to the crowd but also to his descendants—mostly, Eliot thought, to his descendants. “I guess I’m a king of Fillory. But more importantly, I was Quentin Lewis. I was Meg Prentice’s grandfather. I lived in this town for a while when it was small and kind of dumpy and really, really muddy, and, well. I guess I’m back.”

Maggie sniffled, and Quentin held out his hand to her. “I kind of let your great-grandmother cover all of that earlier, I didn’t really know—it was just easier to let her handle things, you know,” he told her.

Maggie hugged him. “It usually is,” she said, half-laughing. “That’s how great-gran became the mayor of Lewiston.”

Quentin cast a slightly-panicked glance at Eliot, who waved him on, and then he hugged her back. Eliot watched him look out at the semicircle of her great-aunts and uncles, her cousins and friends; this family he was connected to, this town that had come to bear his name.

When she pulled away, he gave them an awkward, friendly little wave. “So—hi, I guess,” he said, and then Eliot lost sight of him in the sudden swirl of people gathering around.

Eliot felt a moment of distress—no, come back here—they’d hardly been apart since their final battle against the monster. But this was nothing to worry about: nothing he had to fight. Quentin was drawn into the welcoming crowd and Eliot breathed in, breathed out—remembered that he was Eliot Waugh, not the monster—and let him go.


	3. Chapter 3

Eliot slipped away, heading back to the inn. He trusted that the descendants would be buying Quentin a few rounds, but they’d get him home safe. In the meantime, Eliot would make some preparations.

Outside the festival grounds, he caught sight of a lurking figure. Large, male, head down, hands in pockets. He changed his path to approach the figure from behind, rolling his eyes when the sound of his footsteps didn’t even seem to register.

After fighting gods and monsters, it was hard to take some stupid boy seriously, but stupid boys were still responsible for plenty of quick, bloody, _stupid_ mistakes. Eliot wasn’t about to let this one happen to Maggie.

“Pardon me,” Eliot said to the beefy young guy who’d hassled them earlier, the one Maggie had dated for lack of better options, until Meg put a stop to it. The guy turned, startled, and his eyes narrowed. Eliot had a few inches on him—and a few years, and probably fifty fewer pounds of muscle, but Eliot had killed people, however reluctantly, and he was willing to bet this local yokel had not.

“I didn’t have a chance to introduce myself earlier. I’m Eliot Waugh, formerly known as Eliot Pullman, and still your king. And whatever trouble you’re thinking of creating,” he said, leaning too close and looking down with cold, stern eyes. He didn't need the monster for this: “I would suggest that you do _not_ , or I’ll reach inside you and rip out your spine, piece by bloody piece.”

He smiled. “The nerves always look like spaghetti,” he said, more conversationally. “Can you imagine?”

“What’s spaghetti,” the stupid boy said. Eliot sighed, freshly annoyed, and said, “Go, now, before I show you,” and watched him saunter away, casting glances full of bravado over his shoulder until he was out of sight.

“’What’s spaghetti,’” Eliot said, to the stars twinkling high overhead. “I’m going to open an Olive Garden in Lewiston and blow some fucking minds.”

#

Quentin came in after midnight with his hair wild, his two layers of shirts slightly askew in different ways, eyes bright, and singing, “And my daddy said, ‘stay away from Juliet,’” to the tune of an old Fillorian folk song.

Eliot restrained himself, but it _was_ a challenge.

“Had fun?” he asked, tapping his papers together and moving them to the bedstand. He’d plotted a course for the Muntjac to maximize the beauty of the routes out and the efficiency of the routes back to Lewiston. There was no reason to spend a minute less time than necessary on the romantic parts of the cruise.

“They’re so great, Eliot,” Quentin said, with a dreamy smile. “Did you know that we have two great-great granddaughters who are healers? And one who’s a blacksmith. A magical blacksmith! She put iron shoes on a unicorn once and she’s _still_ on the unicorns’ watchlist, but now they say there isn’t an animal alive that she can’t shoe. Can you believe it?” He struggled out of his pants, chuckling to himself when he encountered his boots.

“Wow,” Eliot said, lightly mocking, even as his chest felt tight with affection. “Do you think she still has the shoes? I bet if you threw them, you’d be horseshoe champion _in aeternum_.”

Quentin shrugged out of his button-down shirt and crawled up the foot of the bed, rather than squeeze between the bed and the wall. He flopped next to Eliot with a whoosh of air, on top of the blankets. “Not me. If I threw them, I’d just hit myself in the head,” he said, smiling sideways at Eliot. “Out like a light. Revenge of the unicorns, I guess, if unicorns do things like revenge.”

Eliot rolled over on his side, bracing his cheek on his hand. “Well, we wouldn’t want that,” he said, reaching over to brush Quentin’s hair back from his temples. He left his arm draped across Quentin’s chest, felt Quentin’s heart beating steadily underneath it.

Quentin’s eyes focused on the ceiling. His lips pursed thoughtfully. He tapped his fingers against Eliot’s arm. “Poker is more my speed. If I can convince Meg to let me teach the younger ones how to play, then we’ll be talking.”

Eliot inched a little closer. “You’d rob your own great-great-great grandchildren?” he asked, delighted.

Quentin nodded seriously, then blew hair out of his face. It drifted back down and he batted it away. “I. Would. Clean up.” He popped the p with a smile, and then, while Eliot was still processing that delightful image, Quentin pushed him onto his back.

Quentin didn’t stop there, though. He followed Eliot, crawling up on his hands and knees, before settling his weight firmly across Eliot’s hips.

Eliot raised his eyebrows. “Well, all right,” he murmured, stretching his arms up and then tucking them behind his head. He’d taken off everything except the silk shorts he preferred to sleep in when he’d crawled into the bed to plot their route. Quentin looked up, into a corner of the room, silently considering something, while his hands settled on Eliot’s bare sides. His fingers gently kneaded, a barely-felt massage.

Eliot let his eyes half-close, content as a cat in a sunbeam.

“I wouldn’t bet against Meg and Octavia, though,” Quentin said. He shifted his weight from side to side, taking some pressure off his bent knees and resting it all in the cradle of Eliot’s hips.

Eliot kept his hands under his head by force of will; let Quentin talk out his strategy as much as he wanted, if he wanted to do it while gently rocking his ass against Eliot’s cock.

“Actually, I probably shouldn’t teach Meg, right? Um, if I ever met anyone who was born to shark—did we ever teach Teddy? I don’t remember. I remember everything else, so you’d think—”

His eyes dropped from the ceiling, then widened in surprise as he glanced down his own body, comically shocked to find himself grinding in Eliot’s lap. “Oh,” he said, faint and confused. “How’d I get up _here_?”

“Your own free will,” Eliot said. He took his hands from behind his head and showed them to Quentin, empty and innocent, before sliding them back under his pillow. His hair felt clean and silky against his fingers, which was something he’d come to appreciate, given the condition the monster had left him in. He twisted his fingers in his own curls and pushed up with a slow roll, hips and stomach and thighs: a strong, smooth motion that rocked Quentin against his cock.

“Huh.” Quentin watched as his hands rode the arch of Eliot’s body. He skipped his fingers over Eliot’s ribs, pressed his left thumb to a mole. “You’re too thin,” he murmured, face slipping into a puzzled frown, as if Eliot’s thinness meant something he couldn’t quite piece together. “You wear all that, that stuff, with the needlepoint. I didn’t notice. The monster wasn’t taking very good care of you.” His frown deepened. “His meat suit. That’s what he said, did I tell you?”

“You haven’t told me much of anything,” Eliot said, shrugging against his pillow. Quentin’s eyes followed the movement and he leaned forward, hands sliding up, too firm to be ticklish. He stopped with his hands wrapped around Eliot’s elbows, thumbs tucked into the soft skin at the crease.

“What’s left to say.” Quentin settled in, his weight pressing against Eliot’s arms and stomach, his eyes still on his own hands. His focus shifted from one side of Eliot’s face to the other, without seeming to notice Eliot watching him.

“Oh, plenty,” Eliot said. “But you mostly keep sniping at me. My theory is that you know if you start talking, you’ll say things you don’t want me to hear. You can tell me if I’m wrong.”

“I don’t—hmm—okay,” Quentin said, and leaned down to kiss him.

Unlike the first kiss out on the dance floor, when Quentin had been angry and trying to prove a point, this kiss was confident from the start, Quentin drunk enough and loose enough to apply his own knowledge of a lifetime of kissing Eliot. Shallow, then a bite, then as slow and deep as Eliot had kissed him. Eliot wrestled with his instincts: push the conversation, or let Quentin distract him? Then Quentin rocked insistently against him, and distraction won.

“What do I have to tell you that you haven’t heard already?” Quentin asked him, an eternity later, rocking more purposefully against him. “I said everything there was, you heard it, you—”

“I wasn’t really listening then,” Eliot murmured. “Tell me again,” but Quentin just kissed him, breathless and soft, and so hot that sweat rolled over the hollow of Eliot’s throat.

Had they always liked to kiss the same way, or had they taught each other to like something, over time? Eliot had kissed Quentin before their lifetime in Fillory, and not even that long ago, but there were so many memories in the way that it was hard to be sure. However it had happened, they knew how to pull each other’s strings, and Eliot gave himself up to it with all the ease of familiarity. Quentin had to be feeling it too, he thought: how good it was between them, how good it had been and could be again, how much he meant it when he said he’d made the worst mistake of his life when he pushed Quentin away.

Quentin sank down onto him, slowly. Eliot took a deep breath to feel Quentin against him, belly to belly, chest to chest, hip to hip. He settled into the cage of Quentin’s legs outside his and hands on his elbows, until—

Until Quentin’s mouth slid wetly over the stubble on Eliot’s chin to land against the crook of his neck and shoulder, purposeless and slack.

Eliot craned his head back and looked down. Quentin’s elbows had come to rest against the mattress, his hands loosening. His back stretched over Eliot’s chest. His breath whistled against Eliot’s neck, shallow and slow, but deepening.

He’d fallen asleep.

Eliot lay underneath him and stared up at the ceiling. When his frustration was under control, he wiggled his arms free. His left arm reached for the lantern on the bedside table, turning it off. His other hand gathered the blankets from Quentin’s side of the bed and twitched them until Quentin was mostly covered up, still draped across Eliot’s chest. His weight was going to make Eliot’s back complain in the morning, but he wouldn’t have moved for anything.

Well, except a blowjob.

“You owe me one,” he whispered to Quentin in the dark, and smiled at Quentin’s faint snore.

#

Quentin had rolled back onto his own side of the bed by morning. When Eliot woke up, he found Q sprawled flat on his face, legs bare under the bit of the blankets still wrapped around him. He was drooling.

Eliot would have liked to pick up where they’d left off the night before. He rolled over on his side and put a hand low on Quentin’s back, thinking about it.

He could straddle Q, wake him up with kisses to the back of the neck, grind against him until he came, then roll Q over and go down on him. But they’d slept late—he could hear people bustling around the inn and on the streets outside—and the Muntjac would be coming by noon.

We’ll be alone tonight, he thought. He stroked his hand across the small of Quentin’s back, where his t-shirt was rucked up. Quentin mumbled and shifted, sighing in his sleep. Alone on the Muntjac, no one to distract them, a full day before they picked up Isadora. There was a lot they could do with all those uninterrupted hours. No need to rush.

“Quentin,” he said quietly. He stroked his hand up Quentin’s back, under his shirt. He was so solid. His skin was warm and smooth under Eliot’s hand. He cupped his palm over Quentin’s shoulder blade and shook him lightly. “Q, time to wake up.”

Q mumbled, “Not in the maze,” then his eyes blinked open. For a moment, he was bleary and unfocused, soft; he smiled at Eliot and his arm moved like he was going to reach out.

Then the hangover hit. Eliot could see it happen. Q suddenly winced and then went pale and swallowed heavily. “Up, up,” he said to Eliot, and Eliot got out of the bed and watched as Q dashed for the tiny bathroom attached to their room.

While Q retched and groaned, Eliot poured a glass of water. He opened their shades and held the glass up, angling it so light filtered through the water. A quick hand gesture, and the water glowed golden and a little fizzy. He sniffed to make sure he’d gotten it right—the wrong golden fizzy could be _very_ uncomfortable—pears and vanilla and mint: terrible in combination, but correct.

He brought it to the bathroom. Quentin was kneeling by the toilet, green and sweaty. “Drink this,” Eliot said, shoving the golden fizzy into his hand. “Daddy’s famous hangover cure.”

Quentin retched again but took the glass. “That’s for you calling yourself Daddy,” he said, and downed it. His color started coming back almost immediately, but he was still wincing as he wiped his mouth and sat back on his heels, taking a deep breath. “Ugh, I forgot how awful that tastes.”

“There is a reason I don’t always use it,” Eliot said. He took the glass back and set it on the wooden countertop—everything in their little bathroom was wooden, which made the space a bit claustrophobic—and reached down to pull Quentin to his feet. Quentin wobbled a little, so Eliot held onto his biceps, examining him. His eyes were clearing and his skin was close to its usually pale golden tone, a little extra flush on his cheekbones.

He really needed to brush his teeth.

“You smell terrible, Q. If you’re feeling better, take a shower—but quick, we have to go see Meg before the Muntjac gets here.”

Quentin groaned and went pale all over again. “The _Muntjac_ ,” he said heavily. “What was I _thinking_.”

Eliot patted him sympathetically on the shoulders. “Hence my application of Daddy’s famous hangover cure,” he said, and laughed when Quentin glared at him. “Fine, fine. I’ll leave you alone—I should settle up with the inn anyway. Meet me outside?”

Q nodded and turned to their small shower, his hands reaching for the hem of his shirt. He pulled it up over his head, unselfconscious, and Eliot allowed himself a moment to pause and admire. Quentin really did look good naked. Eliot did too—he knew it and used it—but he was long and lean, almost stretched-out, pleasingly disproportionate. Quentin was different: not tall but put together well, like he’d been designed to model the correct ratios of a human body.

“I’m not taking off my shorts until you leave,” Quentin said, fiddling with the water temperature. Eliot rolled his eyes but left, dressing quickly on his way to the public restroom at the bottom of the stairs. There would be time to take Q’s shorts off him, grab his tight little ass, and follow him into the shower later. He could wait.

#

Quentin was no more ready to visit the cemetery in the sharp, clean light of morning. He hustled by the path without glancing at it or saying a word.

Eliot lingered for a moment, considering. The path led up a short hill to a stone fence, lined with low bushes, dense and leafy, dark green and glossy under the late fall sunshine. He thought he remembered those bushes having delicate white flowers in the spring. It was weird to think that there was a headstone for him there, and Quentin, and Arielle, and their son.

He’d have gone up the hill if Quentin had stopped, but Quentin had picked up his pace so that he was practically jogging away from the path. Eliot watched him go, sunlight gilding his hair, the strap of his messenger bag pulling across the back of his old flannel shirt. It was easy to understand why Quentin would want to avoid the cemetery, but Eliot hoped his avoidance wouldn’t last forever.

He loped after Quentin to catch up. Quentin cast him an uneasy, sideways look, like he expected Eliot to push him, but Eliot just matched his stride.

“They’ll still be here when we come back,” he said quietly. Quentin nodded, arm brushing his as they turned the corner to Meg’s house.

#

The crowd gathered at Meg’s to see them off was almost identical to the crowd at the dance. Some of the older, less-friendly faces had been replaced with younger ones, the toddlers and infants belonging to their great-great-grandkids, and that seemed to be the only difference: higher quality, equal quantity.

“We’ve got to get some new blood in this town, or this family is going to end like the Hapsburgs,” he said to Quentin, during a brief break between being grilled by teenagers about Earth and the castle, and being grilled by Meg’s kids about who they were going to pick up and how and who was going to be feeding them.

Quentin had one of the toddlers on his hip. The boy had settled there with a solemn expression when his father handed him over, and Quentin had accepted him with equal seriousness. They turned identical soft brown eyes on Eliot, who was compelled to reach over and tickle the kid under the chin.

He’d have done the same to Quentin, but Q shook his head with a warning in his eyes, like he knew what Eliot was thinking—and where was the fun in being predictable?

“We should start some kind of industry here,” Q said while Eliot played with the toddler. “Something the Fillorians need. Low environmental impact.”

“Clubs,” Eliot said. “Don’t make that face, Q, it’s pretty out here. This could totally be a party scene.”

Quentin bounced the kid on his hip. “I was thinking maybe a school, like for academics and magic or something,” he said, disapproving. “Like Brakebills, but with life skills and, like, physics.”

“Sounds boring without a nightlife.” Eliot waggled his eyebrows, and the toddler put his head down on Quentin’s shoulder but finally cracked a smile, dimples flashing, while Quentin sighed.

Meg approached, the crowd parting for her solicitously as she hobbled over, one hand on a stout cane and the other tucked into the crook of Erdo’s arm. Her white hair glowed and was neatly tied back at her neck, and her brown eyes were bright, but her lips were pinched tight with discomfort and her cheeks were pale. Eliot understood that no work of an ordinary magician could flawlessly heal old bones without the help of time, but it was still difficult to see her—his Meg, their Meg—looking so frail.

“Let us take you to Chatwin’s Torrent,” he said. “With the Muntjac, we could have you there in no time. If you don’t have a gift, we could always—”

“No, no, my dear,” she said. “The Torrent takes more than you expect, gift or no gift. I’d go in to heal this leg, and I’d come home to find one of my grandchildren lost an eye, or worse. I’ll take my chances with the healers. Now, come here.” She gestured imperiously for Eliot and he took her arm from Erdo, bracing her weight and keeping her steady. The toddler on Quentin’s hip reached for her and she shook her head at him, but leaned in to kiss his rosy cheek.

“You two have everything you need?” she asked Eliot. “You know where you’re going? Do you need better instructions? Because Maggie and I wrote those, but I could always—”

“Who’s the grandparent here?” Eliot asked her, amused. “We should be asking you these questions. Are you supposed to be on your feet right now? Do you need more support? Are they bringing you enough snacks?”

“When you get to be my age, you’ve earned the right to—ah,” Meg said, catching the look on Quentin’s face and remembering. “But of course you’ve been my age. Well, I’m my age now, and you’re not, so I get to ask the questions here. Are they bringing _you_ enough snacks?”

“I’m more concerned with whether or not they’re bringing enough drinks.” Eliot patted Meg’s hand. “But I think Quentin is off alcohol for a bit. Your grandkids sent him back to the inn disgustingly drunk last night.”

Meg tsked. “So Maggie told me. I hope you’re proud of yourself, Grandpa. You made quite the impression on Lewiston.”

Quentin shifted the toddler to his other hip, looking around for the kid’s dad. “I am kinda, yeah,” he told Meg. “I’m not usually, you know, the life of the party? It was nice. I probably shouldn’t have let Octavia and Jules bring me those last shots, though.” He chuckled, rueful. “Well, I think those were the last shots. Everything afterwards is a little hazy.”

Eliot tilted his head. “Everything?”

“Well, I remember telling the kids about that year the maze burned down, which I still think is your fault, because of those fireworks,” Quentin told him. They both smiled a little at the memory. “And I woke up in, uh, my own bed this morning, so I must have gotten home okay somehow. But otherwise it’s a blank. I probably shouldn’t tell you that, Meg. Gotta set a good example.”

“My drinking days are long behind me,” Meg said briskly. She looked up at Eliot, frowning, and he loosened his grip on her arm and smiled down at her, apologetic.

“Your grandfather and I had a good talk last night. I was just surprised he doesn’t remember,” he told her, watching Quentin stand up straighter and frown. “But I’m afraid we have to get going anyway—our ship should be here by now. Erdo. Erdo! Jack!”

Eliot’s voice carried when he wanted it to, and it wasn’t long before the crowd had spat the boys into their vicinity. He kissed Meg on the cheek, then went back to wrap his arms over her shoulders for a moment, swaying with her, before taking a step back. Quentin was still eyeing him, but passed the toddler over when Eliot held his arms out, and went to hug his granddaughter.

“I’m so glad you came,” she said to him, and Quentin nodded, tucking his chin down over her delicate shoulder. “I wasn’t sure you ever would, and Daddy was _very_ clear that we might ruin the memory magic if we triggered it too soon. It’s been so hard to wait.”

“I’m so glad you were here.” Quentin sounded choked up. 

Eliot squeezed the toddler, searching the crowd for his father; ah, there he was, a man only slightly taller than Q, with the reddest hair in the family. Arielle would have loved the crisp copper color. Eliot gestured him over and passed him his son, feeling déjà vu as the toddler reached for his father. He remembered the relief of taking Teddy back from whoever had claimed him, and the sweetness of Teddy’s easy weight settling on his hip. Teddy’s joyful acceptance of him had dealt the final blow to Eliot’s fear of becoming a father: what was there to be afraid of, in the face of so much love? He smoothed the toddler’s hair and let him go with an affectionate ache in his chest, then gripped Quentin’s shoulder.

Meg pulled back and put her hand on Quentin’s cheeks. She looked into his eyes, so much like hers. “Isn’t it strange to think how proud my daddy would be of you?” she wondered, and Quentin almost twitched his way out of her hands.

“I was so proud of him,” he said, low, almost too low for Eliot to hear, when she didn’t let him go. “I really was, Meg. I loved him more than I knew you could love anyone. And I know he loved you the same way.”

Meg’s eyes filled, and then she snorted and thumped her cane on the ground, as if that would force the tears back. “Enough of that nonsense,” she said sternly. “You’ll make me sentimental in my old age. I’ve worked too hard on my reputation to ruin it now. Go on now, you two, but take care of each other, and hurry back. We still have to tell all our most embarrassing family stories. I want to hear about how one raises a child on Earth. It just seems impossible to do without magic.”

“We’ve never raised a kid on Earth, but I’ll tell you stories about families we saw on talk shows that will blow your hair back,” Eliot promised. He blew her one more kiss and started to draw Quentin away, through the crowded kitchen, so bright and lively with all their family gathered to wish them well.

Maggie met them at the door. “I’ll walk you to the dock,” she said. Eliot looked at her, frowning—her cheek looked red, and her smile was crooked and slow in a way he hadn’t seen before during their visit. She caught him noticing and turned her face away.

“Did your ex bother you last night after I left? I saw him on my way back to the inn and tried to warn him off,” he murmured quietly, while Quentin was distracted by a last round of hugs.

“Only a little,” Maggie said, and that was that: Eliot was going to send a rabbit to Margo and have her get someone down to Lewiston to kill a man.

“No, don’t worry about it.” Maggie caught the murderous look in his eye, took his hand and squeezed it. “I’m fine, of course. I can look out for myself. I am a Lewis, you know.”

“That is _not_ reassuring,” Eliot said darkly, looking at Quentin. No one from this bloodline should ever have to look out for themselves, he thought. They were too good and, quite possibly, too dumb for it.

Excepting Meg, of course.

“What’s not reassuring?” Quentin asked, joining them. He smiled at Maggie, pushed his hair back. “Does anyone else have some advice for us? I’m not taking any except for from, um, Octavia, Jules, and little Diney over there, just so you know.”

“You were willing to take my advice last night,” Maggie teased, and Quentin winced but laughed, a flush on his cheeks. Eliot tilted his head: Q would never tell him what advice Maggie had given him, but he bet he could get the story out of Erdo, if he had a little time.

“I don’t even remember your advice!” Quentin protested, lying with a smile. Maggie laughed too, and the two of them teased each other comfortably all the way down to the river.

It was nice, Eliot thought, watching them. But he was still going to have a man killed. No one messed with his family. Not anymore.

#

The Muntjac had arrived and floated majestically just above the water’s surface; she drew too deep to actually navigate the broad, shallow river that flowed through Lewiston. Their planned route took them by air to the sea, through the water for a skip, and then back over land to the next enclave of descendants. Meg’s brother Charles had wandered off, she told them, around the time she became mayor—

_Coincidence, of course—_

And established his own family halfway up a mountain. He lived there until he died, in a quiet valley with views of a crystal-clear, deep, silent lake known for its monsters and its magical healing powers, if you managed to avoid the monsters— 

“Nothing ever happens there,” Meg said with a sniff. “No progress whatsoever. Who’d want to live like that? I’d have running water to every home in a minute. And for another thing—”

_Coincidence._

Maggie waited with them while the crew of the Muntjac prepared; Quentin had asked her opinion on a school based in Lewiston, and listened to her responses with earnest attention, clearly taking mental notes.

Some of the other descendants wandered down, singly and in small groups, to deliver things Meg said she had forgotten to give them before: baskets of bread, cookies, books, a blanket, a list of instructions for how to work the gate at Charles’s homestead. The gifts piled up on the dock as everyone joined the conversation.

Eliot sprawled on a bench, eating a cookie and watching them. It was good to be reminded of life on a smaller scale than gods and monsters and castles, and it seemed right and appropriate for Quentin to have found these people and to fit in with them so easily—or as easily as he ever fit in with anyone, which made sense to Eliot. 

The great-grandkids were their own people, of course, and still mostly strangers to he and Quentin, but there were hints of likeness made them _feel_ like family. It wasn’t just that Quentin’s descendants physically looked like him. They had an air of forthrightness, of willingness, of _kindness_ —even Meg—that could only have come from him. 

And yet there was evidence of Eliot’s own impact, too: a supportive kiss to the temple _here_ , a wryly sarcastic joke _there_. It was both shocking and natural to see something of himself in these people. Eliot had never thought he’d be a father, but despite his many, varied flaws, he had grown into the kind of man who could raise Teddy and the grandkids with love and humor. It made his heart twist in his chest to think that perhaps Quentin was so comfortable with his descendants because they reminded him of _Eliot_ , as well as himself—because the immediate connection between them had helped create this family. 

The connection Eliot had so stupidly damaged.

But, Eliot thought, watching Quentin squint in the sunshine, his hair gleaming—there was still hope. Even if he didn’t remember it now, Quentin had come to him. Had kissed him and fallen asleep with him. 

With his defenses down, Quentin knew what he wanted.

The Muntjac blared a horn, and everyone turned to watch an anchor come sailing over the side. She sank a little lower, sounded another horn, tossed another anchor.

Eliot rose from his bench and slipped through the crowd of their descendants to stand beside Quentin. He draped his arm over Quentin’s shoulder, leaning against him, and dropped his cheek down on Quentin’s hair for a moment. The Muntjac was especially appealing in the crisp morning light. He was glad to finally be making one thing right: a journey by sea, just the two of them.

“Whatever happened last night didn’t mean we’re—I don’t know—that we went back in time,” Quentin said quietly, watching the Muntjac bob above the water. A heave-ho from above, and a final anchor came down, the Muntjac settling just above the water’s surface at the dock. A fine wood and golden ramp unrolled itself to the dock’s surface. One of the Lewis boys struggled up it with their bags, then waved down at his cousins from the deck. Quentin, watching him, smiled.

“I should have guessed that, really,” Eliot said wryly, turning his head to kiss Quentin’s hair. “We’re never on the easiest road, are we? But I will admit that I was hoping to avoid a chaste honeymoon cruise.”

“Oh my God,” Quentin said, taking a step away. He ran his hand through his hair and then covered his eyes with his hands. “A honeymoon implies a wedding, Eliot. We didn’t even get married after fifty years at the cottage. Fuck, you wouldn’t even _date_ me a year ago.”

“A year ago, I was _very_ interested in destroying any chance I had at anything good,” Eliot said. “This year, I am _very_ interested in seducing you while we see the world from our own royal yacht. Do those count as vows? What do you think?”

“I think—thanks, Octavia,” Quentin said, taking an overflowing picnic basket from her. She smiled at him, knowingly, and patted his hand. “Say yes, my dear,” she advised, and Quentin said, “Oh my God, okay, you know—Eliot, take this, _bye_ ,” and he disappeared up the ramp.

“Keep trying, Papa,” Maggie said, and kissed his cheek.

“Oh, I will,” Eliot said, and followed Quentin onto their ship.

#

Eliot didn’t see Quentin for the rest of that day; Q disappeared into his own dark quarters within minutes of bounding on board, and Eliot didn’t try to hunt him down. He figured that between the aftereffects of whatever amount of alcohol his spell hadn’t taken care of, and the various and assorted emotional overloads, Quentin probably needed some time.

The Muntjac flew on steadily over the forests and hamlets of Fillory, rivers and lakes flashing underneath them like mirrors, fog-shrouded meadows appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye.

Eliot reclined on the window seat in front of the big windows at the stern of the ship and watched it all race away and felt—not for the first time—fierce, protective love for this stupid, backwards, feral world. There was beauty everywhere, and wild magic, and creatures straight out of a thousand different storybooks, somehow all a part of one ecological system held together with paperclips and tape and spells.

Even taking the more obvious magic out of the equation, there was something fundamentally different about Fillory, compared to the world they’d left behind. It was wholly earnest in a way he’d never experienced on Earth, not on the farm and not in New York and certainly not at Brakebills. Eliot didn’t think of himself as an earnest person; or at least, he had tried not to be, until Quentin came along and taught him of the value of sincerity. 

But as challenging and murderous as life in Fillory had been since their very first day, it was also…easy. He and Fillory shared some core principle—unexpectedly, almost without Eliot intending to feel any resonance between himself and the Chatwins’ childhood fantasy world. The earnestness of Fillory meant something to him. He and Fillory understood each other.

Of course, there was the opium too.

If there was no possibility of going back to Earth tomorrow—if time and space collapsed and left them stranded on Fillory—as long as he had Margo and Quentin with him, Eliot thought he’d survive the loss. It would be all right. They could build something good together. They were building it already.

When Quentin came out of his quarters early that evening, quiet and tired, Eliot, reclined on his side, made a little room on the window seat and held out his arm. Quentin wordlessly settled down in front of him, leaned back against him, and let Eliot hug him around the waist.

They watched Fillory fly by as the sun set, lights twinkling in scattered patches down below, until the Muntjac curved a gentle arc out over the ocean and the land all disappeared.

The Muntjac settled into the water with a sound almost like a sigh of relief—she could fly, but the water was her home—and they sailed smoothly through the waves.

“Not a lot of good memories here for me. Worse on the water.” Quentin straightened up with a sigh. He reached for one of the jewel-toned pillows Eliot had pushed aside and turned it over in his hands, examining the embroidery. “The key quest, losing Benedict, the whole thing with Poppy—I don’t know. It all really fucked with me. I don’t know if I ever told you.”

“I’m sorry,” Eliot said. He sat up, sliding forward until they were hip to hip. “I wish I’d been there.”

Quentin looked at him searchingly. “You know what, I wished you were there, too,” he said. “I kept turning around to tell you something and going—oh right, he isn’t here. He doesn’t really _want _to be here. I don’t think it would have changed much that happened—hell, maybe having you here would have made things worse. I don’t know. But it was hard to go through it alone.”__

__He stopped, hesitating over his words. “But I did go through it alone. I guess there was some value to that. I started to figure out that I could, you know. That I could accomplish things in Fillory without you—the rest of you.”_ _

__The missing piece of a puzzle slid into place. “Is that part of the reason why you volunteered to stay with the monster?”_ _

__“Partially, yeah.” Quentin picked at a loose thread on the pillow. “And partially because it seemed like the safest solution for everyone. And partially because I was kind of sad and didn’t mind the idea of disappearing into the pit of a black castle on the abandoned dark side of a planet for a while. You know. Like you do.” He quirked a sideways smile at Eliot. “And who knows. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad.”_ _

__“Oh sure. Not so bad. Spend eternity with a monster because you’re horrifically depressed and need the support of the people who love you, but think you have to push them away instead.” Eliot put his arm over Quentin’s shoulder, drew his head down and kissed his hair before pushing him away to look at him. “Of course, the idea is entirely hypothetical. There’s no way, absolutely no way, I would ever have left you alone—not there, not with it, not with any other monsters this universe wants to throw at us. Do you understand? You don’t fight these monsters alone anymore.”_ _

__Eliot stood and pulled Quentin to his feet, tossing the pillow back onto the window seat. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat. I think one of those last-minute baskets from Meg had sandwiches.”_ _

__Quentin pushed his hair back behind his ears and studied Eliot. “You wouldn’t do things differently if you had a chance to go back to Blackspire and start over?”_ _

__“I’d choose to wind up here,” Eliot squeezed Quentin’s shoulders, holding his gaze and hoping Quentin could see how deeply he meant what he said. “Whatever it took to make this happen, I’d do it.”_ _

__“Even though I’m not, uh.” Quentin cleared his throat, waved a hand. At some point he’d unbuttoned his cuffs, and his flannel shirt sleeve flopped around, baring his wrist. He’d never gotten the hang of dressing like a ruler of Fillory. Margo liked the extra room that left her in whatever passed for their budget, but Eliot would have liked to glam up a little more often. Find out how long Quentin could tolerate being treated like a paper doll, and how bitchily he’d strip and pounce on Eliot when his tolerance ran out._ _

__The flannel of his shirt looked soft, though. Eliot reached for him, running his fingers lightly over the knobby bone at the wrist joint. He felt the fine skin there, ruffling the hair, before taking his hand. Quentin let him, head tilted down. “You know, even though I wasn’t on board with the honeymoon scheme.”_ _

__“Well, that’s just you not being on board _yet_ ,” Eliot said, pulling back and tugging on Quentin’s hand. “Come on. From what I hear, Meg’s sandwiches _do not_ get better with age. Jules was telling me about the time he lost a tooth in—I think it was ham and mustard and some kind of lumpy nut butter, did he tell you that one—”_ _

__Quentin shuddered. “I drank to forget it,” he said, and they went to get their dinner, trading little pieces of gossip back and forth._ _

__#_ _

__Charles’s mountain valley was one of the most beautiful places Eliot had ever seen in his life. Autumn had just started to change the leaves in Lewiston, but snow had already started to fall in the mountains, so the landscape was strikingly monochromatic: evergreens shaded so deep they were almost black; boulders hunched up under blankets of ice; and waters so clear and still that they mirrored the gray sky with uncanny precision._ _

__The Muntjac settled on the water with a gentle splash, followed by a series of loud clanks all around as bespelled metal spikes unfolded on her hull to keep the lake monsters from trying anything._ _

__“Do you ski at all?” Eliot asked Quentin as he wrapped a scarf around Quentin’s throat, adjusting it until it lay in immaculate loops and draped folds._ _

__Quentin stared over his shoulder at the tiny town climbing the hillside. The sight of the Muntjac coming over the peaks had sent a small shape in a red jacket running from the lakeside with a shout, a black-and-white dog at its heels. Even from the lake, Eliot could hear excited voices._ _

__“Ha,” Quentin said, fidgeting. “Oh, that was a real question. No, I never learned. No one would have trusted me with skis. I broke my ankle at the playground as a kid. On a slide.”_ _

__“I’ll teach you sometime. We’ll come back here and build a little chalet.” Eliot tugged the ends of the scarf, smiling. “We can look for Bigfoot. I bet if he’s anywhere, he’s here.”_ _

__People were starting to stream out of the town, following the dog down to the water’s edge. The red jacket belonged to a kid, who waved wildly while dragging a large bag down the hill._ _

__“Someone’s eager to meet us.” Eliot straightened his own scarf, pulled on leather gloves in a rich shade of dark blue. “Are you ready?”_ _

__“Probably not,” Quentin said, but followed him to the shore._ _

__#_ _

__“And that’s Wic, and that’s Billony, and that’s Regis, and I’m Chicken,” the small kid in the red jacket said. They took a deep breath, then flung themself at Quentin’s legs, hugging him around the knees._ _

__“Oof.” Quentin rocked back and windmilled his arms. Eliot braced a hand on his back to help keep him upright, smiling down at—Chicken._ _

__“Did you say that one of these cousins is named Billony?” he asked, pulling the kid’s red hood back. Underneath was yet another strawberry blonde with big brown eyes—Quentin and Arielle had bred as true as Eliot’s dad’s favorite bull. “Do you—is bologna a thing here?”_ _

__The big brown eyes had long brown lashes, which batted up at him in confusion. “I just told you,” Chicken said. “Billony.”_ _

__Eliot sighed happily. “This place is ridiculous,” he said to Quentin. “A great-great-great grandchild named Bologna. Is Chicken your real name, pumpkin?”_ _

__Quentin glared at him and tugged Chicken’s hood back up, tucking her—Eliot was pretty sure—loosely ponytailed hair back under it._ _

__“I’m Christabelle,” Chicken said. “Only no one calls me that, so I won’t answer to it.”_ _

__A round woman in an apron came to a huffing stop at the shoreline. “Chicken!” she hissed, casting a look both horrified and apologetic at Quentin and Eliot. “These are your _grandfathers_.” She dragged Chicken off Quentin’s legs with a suddenness that set him wobbling again. “Pay them some respect.”_ _

__Chicken studied Eliot, then Quentin. Her mouth pursed. “Grandfathers are old and have weird hair and bad teeth,” she said. “ _These_ are _not_ grandfathers.”_ _

__The woman groaned. “I tried to explain about the time loops, but it didn’t take with this one,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’m Nuzzi, I’m her mother, for what that’s worth.” Then, studying their faces with eyes as dark and sweet as her daughter’s, she shook her head. “Aunt Meg’s rabbit said you were just like the drawings in great-granddad’s book, but it’s still a shock. My word. You certainly _are_ a Lewis, aren’t you.”_ _

__“ _The_ Lewis,” Eliot said proudly. He held out his hand. “And I’m Eliot Waugh. Pullman, I suppose, in the family lore.”_ _

__Nuzzi put her own gloved hand in his, but not to shake. She held onto him instead, studying his face. Then she reached for his other hand too. “Oh, you truly are,” she said. Her eyes welled up. “Oh, oh no, I was hoping I wouldn’t do this—Chicken, Chicken, didn’t I tell you not to let me do this?”_ _

__“You said not to let you cry tonight at dinner,” Chicken corrected. “This is not dinner.”_ _

__Nuzzi laughed, but that made the tears fall. She dashed them away from her cheeks with her gloved hands. “Ignore me,” she said, “I’m so sorry, I’ll stop—kids, come on, we’re not—do you have your _bag_ , Chicken? Don’t be silly, they’re here for Isadora. We’ll feed your grandfathers first—oh what do we call you? I can’t call someone younger than me Papa, can I?”_ _

__“Meg did,” Quentin said faintly. “But you can, uh, can definitely just call me Quentin. Quentin is fine.”_ _

__“Uncle Quentin,” Nuzzi decided. “Uncle Eliot. Kids, let’s bring them back to town safe and sound, what do you say—we’ve had some trouble with wolves of late,” she said to them in an aside, and Eliot took Quentin’s other hand—Chicken having claimed one already—“For protection from wolves,” Eliot told him very seriously._ _

__“Maybe I want to run away with the wolves,” Quentin said. He made a face at Chicken, who beamed up at him, hanging from his arm._ _

__“Not going to happen with me and Chicken on the case.” Eliot swung their joined hands between them. “The wolves would flee before us, shrieking, into the night.”_ _

__“Sounds like fun,” Quentin said. Chicken told him, “If you want to howl like a wolf, I can show you how—we can run like that all the way up to the hall,” and Nuzzi laughed when Quentin glanced at her for permission, so they did._ _

__#_ _

__Eliot could see Quentin carefully examining everyone’s faces as they sat with the family at a long wooden table in the communal dining room. The carved stone ceiling arched overhead, and stained glass sparkled in the windows. A few black-and-white dogs, a little more wolfish than border collies, curled up in the corners and grinned as platters were delivered to the table. The platters were piled high with lamb and root vegetables and steaming mugs of a chicken broth. The broth made Eliot feel like he could climb the mountain and come back down ready for more._ _

__“Made with water from the lake,” Nuzzi said proudly when he’d downed his first mug and asked for a refill._ _

__“What would you say the ratio is: roughly one part chicken stock and one part magical water to one part monster piss?” Eliot asked. Nuzzi nodded, beaming, and Eliot took another sip. In Fillory, that was less monster piss than there _could_ have been._ _

__Quentin cleared his throat and leaned forward, his elbows on the table, full mug of broth between them. “So, uh. Not that it’s not lovely to meet you all, because it definitely is, but—which one of you is Isadora?”_ _

__“Oh, she’s out hunting wolves with the twins,” Nuzzi said. The twins, she explained, were not actually twins, but male cousins born the same month. They had been mixed up more than once since then—but everyone was reasonably certain they were living with their respective birth parents now. “And Billony, and Uncle Rip, who made it back from his fishing trip just in time to join them.”_ _

__“Rip? Like van Winkle?” Eliot asked. He put his elbows on the table and cupped his chin in his hand, smiling at Nuzzi. “Please tell me Rip van Winkle is my great-great-great grandson. Nothing could possibly be better.”_ _

__“No, he’s a Lewis,” Nuzzi said, bemused but pleased by his interest. “He does tend to stay out too long, so he might not make it. He fell asleep in a cave and stayed there a week the last time they went out, if you can believe it—”_ _

__“Rip van Winkle,” Eliot said with a happy sigh. “Fillory never fails to delight.”_ _

__The heavy wooden double doors were flung open, letting in a burst of fresh, cold air. Eliot turned with everyone else to look: a silhouette, standing with one hand wrapped in the fur of a bleeding lump._ _

__“Got him!” the silhouette said. It had a young, cheerful female voice. “That should fix it, Mama. I think he was the last of the pack.”_ _

__She took a step forward and Eliot shared a glance with Quentin. Even dressed in what had to be a dozen layers—including at least two of leather—she was beautiful: as tall as Quentin, willowy, with a bright, dimpled smile, and Chicken’s wild curls._ _

__She was also absolutely coated in blood._ _

__“Leave that outside,” Nuzzi said sharply. “Don’t you dare. It took me a month to clean up from the last one.”_ _

__“Nine days,” Chicken corrected her._ _

__“That one was much larger,” Isadora protested, but she turned and clunked back outside with the enormous wolf’s head. A grunt, a thunk. Blood splattered on the outside of a stained glass window. Isadora came back inside, stripping off her gloves. She tossed the gloves to the dogs, who squabbled quietly over them as she sat at the table._ _

__“She’s a blockbuster,” Eliot whispered to Quentin. “Let’s go home and write the screenplay.”_ _

__Quentin rolled his eyes. “You can’t monetize our great-whatever-grandchildren, Eliot.”_ _

__“You were going to shark them at poker! Oh—you don’t remember telling me that, so you think you can keep your mantle of purity. Fine.” Eliot sat back up and held out his hand to Isadora. He waited patiently while she finished using one of her mother’s fine white cloths to wipe blood off her face. “I’m your great-great-great grandfather, Eliot,” he told her. “This is your other great-great-great grandfather, Quentin. We’ve come to bring you to Lewiston.”_ _

__“I don’t especially want to go to Lewiston,” Isadora said, but firmly shook his hand. “City life is not for me.”_ _

__Quentin blinked at her, then took her hand when she offered it to him. “Uh—hi. Quentin Coldwater. Or Lewis, I guess. Lewiston is…the city?”_ _

__“Spoken like someone who grew up in New York,” Eliot said. “I get you, girl. Anything bigger than this little hamlet must seem absolutely wretched. But as a small town farm boy myself, I can vouch for the fact that it’s perfectly pleasant.”_ _

__Isadora shrugged and picked up her silver mug of the lake water broth, drowning it in a few long swallows them thumping it back down on the table with a burp. “No, that’s not it. I just have no desire to meet Meg Lewis. My great-grandfather said she was insufferable. I don’t have time for insufferable people.”_ _

__She leaned forward, her elbow on the table, smiling pretty insufferably herself. “I’ve got too many adventures awaiting me,” she said, and dug into her dinner._ _

__“We were promised she was biddable,” Eliot muttered to Quentin. He cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Nuzzi? We were promised she was biddable?”_ _

__“Oh, she’s biddable all right,” Nuzzi said. She sighed at her daughter. “As long as the one doing the bidding is herself.”_ _

__Eliot sat back. “How did you end up with these sassy people in your family tree?”_ _

__“Arielle,” Quentin said. He smiled down into his mug of broth._ _

__“So did I tell you where I found the last wolf?” Isadora asked the children at the table. She leaned forward and waved a hunk of lamb in their faces. The lamb dripped gravy on the tablecloth. The kids shook their heads, watching Isadora with wide eyes as she leaned even closer and said, low and threatening, “Under. Chicken’s. _Bed_.”_ _

__“You had some influence too,” Quentin said to Eliot. “Can’t blame me at all.”_ _

__#_ _

__Getting Isadora on the Muntjac and then out of the monster-filled lake was a production. She wanted to use the Muntjac’s deck as a new vantage point from which to take out the largest of the monsters: a long, snaking shape they mostly only saw from a distance, which Eliot argued with glee _had_ to be a relative of the Loch Ness monster. Maybe even the creature herself, slipping through a crack between Charles’s families fjord in Fillory and the loch in Scotland._ _

__“I don’t care where she comes from,” Isadora said. She hung over the side of the ship with a pair of long blades in her hands. Her eyes were focused on the shadowy figures circling the Muntjac, and not on her family waving goodbye from the shore. “I want her head for my mantle.”_ _

__“Leave it alone, Ahab,” Eliot said, and helped Quentin hold her back as the Muntjac launched._ _

__Two days later—the third time Isadora had made them set the Muntjac down so that she could recklessly throw her life at some monster, scoundrel, or fiend—Quentin sighed. Of course one of his descendants had a magical ability to find trouble. Eliot patted him on the shoulder sympathetically._ _

__“Will you take some of the blame yet?” he asked._ _

__“I’m not—I don’t have her bravado,” Quentin said. He winced as a piece of tentacle flew over their heads. “This still seems more like a you thing.”_ _

__“Ah, but I’m not inclined to risk death with quite as much vigor,” Eliot said. “ _That_ seems like a you thing.”_ _

__“She won’t bother you a moment longer,” Isadora said kindly to the young girl who’d alerted them to the trouble. “I’m so sorry. I wish you had never had to deal with such a beast.”_ _

__Quentin sighed again. “Maybe some of the blame is on me.”_ _

__“I don’t know how to thank you,” the girl sighed, drawing closer to Isadora. She rested a hand tentatively on Isadora’s leather-clad arm. Then her hand slid up, her eyes widened, and—_ _

__“That’s definitely you,” Quentin said, while Eliot watched his great-great-great granddaughter with pride._ _

__“There’s conquests and then there’s _conquests_ ,” Eliot said. He laughed as Isadora set the girl back on her feet, blushing and red-lipped, then bounded over to join them. “Another trophy for your mantel, eh?”_ _

__“Or two,” Isadora said. She leapt fearlessly from the dock to tumble over the Muntjac’s rail like a gymnast._ _

__“Biddable,” Quentin muttered. He put his head in his hands._ _

__“We’re almost to the cliffs.” Eliot patted him on the shoulder. “She can’t find that many more monsters between here and there.”_ _

__Quentin peeked at him with one despondent eye. “You _think_ so?” he said. “Because I’m pretty sure they blink into existence just for her. It’s the only—actually, _is_ that possible—I wish we had a better library on the Muntjac—” and he let Eliot lead him back on board their ship._ _

__#_ _

__“All right. More monsters than I anticipated,” Eliot said wearily. Four days had passed and they’d encountered five monsters at varying levels of bloodthirstiness. They should have been at Will’s cliffside city home three days prior. He chucked a rock from the dwindling supply in his pocket and winced when it missed its target._ _

__The Muntjac, left floating in a river a half-mile away, stank almost too much to tolerate. Isadora’s trophies had started to pile up in the hold. She’d put a preservation spell on them but the spell had side effects of its own. None of the trophies decayed in the slightest—they just put off an aroma like a pine tree being dissolved in a vat full of vinegar._ _

__All of Eliot’s plans to woo Quentin had flown out the window. They were exhausted from helping Isadora fight the monsters she seemed to conjure up from nowhere. The ship smelled disgusting. Isadora liked to stay up all night trading tall tales back and forth with Eliot, Quentin hanging on their every word and dropping the occasional bitchy or nitpicky aside—fun, but not an ideal atmosphere for seduction._ _

__Quentin threw a bespelled dagger at the latest monster: a zombified goat. Neither its size nor its goatiness prevented it from desiring the taste of human flesh—quite the opposite—and it had been terrorizing the hamlets outside the city limits._ _

__“I’m happy to help kill zombie goats,” Isadora had said, smiling brightly at the cute young shepherd who’d flagged them down. He blushed and stuttered out an offer to lead her to its lair. Now they were off who-knew-where doing Eliot-knew-what. He and Quentin had been left to deal with the goat._ _

__One of Quentin’s daggers hit the mark. The goat—which had run them up a tree shortly after spotting them—screamed angrily and snapped at its own shoulder, trying to get the dagger out._ _

__“This is the last one,” Quentin said. “I’m tired. I want to stop smelling like a rancid air freshener. Do we need to find out about Teddy’s spell, Eliot, really, or could we just leave her here to do—whatever it is that she’s doing?”_ _

__Eliot gripped his shoulder. The branch they were crouching on wobbled threateningly. The goat stopped biting at its own side and braced its front hooves back on the tree trunk. It looked up at them with its long, sideways pupils and bloody beard. Eliot would have sworn it understood they weren’t going to be up on that tree branch for long if the tree had anything to say about it._ _

__“I’ve made stew out of better than you,” he told it. He bared his teeth. The goat bleated back at him and headbutted the trunk of the tree._ _

__“I’ve only got one dagger left, don’t antagonize it,” Quentin muttered. “Ugh. God. Okay, here goes.” He threw the last dagger with one eye closed, his tongue caught between his teeth._ _

__The dagger hit the goat in the other shoulder. It dropped back down on all four feet, screaming furiously—Eliot wished Quentin had hit it in the voice box—but that wasn’t enough to take it out, and the tree branch was going to give way any moment—_ _

__“Why’d you let it run you up there?” Isadora asked. She trotted down the hill, pulling a short sword from a sheath on her back. The shepherd followed, looking abashed. He had hay in his long black hair._ _

__“Why’d you take off with that adorable little—nevermind. Question asked, question answered,” Eliot said. “Do you think you could—”_ _

__Isadora decapitated the goat._ _

__Eliot shrugged. “That’s fine too.”_ _

__Isadora poked the goat’s head with her sword. The rest of its body twitched and went still. “No use taking this with us,” she said with regret. “I’ve already got a pile of them at home. Quite the infestation in the mountains last year. That’s what drove the wolves to our valley, you know.” And to her shepherd, “Can you burn it? As hot as you can, for as long as you can.”_ _

__“It will burn like my love for you,” he promised solemnly._ _

__Quentin tumbled out of the tree, trying to tuck and roll but failing almost entirely. Eliot watched from the tree branch, wincing when Quentin hopped up with a scrape on his chin._ _

__“Don’t get zombie goat blood in that cut,” Eliot warned, climbing down more carefully._ _

__“Too bad about the goat. We gotta go.” Quentin wrapped a hand around Isadora’s elbow and tugged her along. He said apologetically over his shoulder to the shepherd, “Maybe next time—hey, sorry, we need to—um, see you later.”_ _

__Eliot took a moment to linger with the shepherd. He looked at Eliot with tragic eyes the color of honey, and full, pink lips, and—well, Isadora had good taste. “She’s a heartbreaker,” he said, patting the shepherd’s hand consolingly. “But we’ll remind her to look you up if we ever come back this way. All right?”_ _

__“Hope he burns that goat,” Isadora was saying when Eliot caught up to them on the Muntjac. “I tried to warn him not to eat it, at least.”_ _

__Then she caught sight of Quentin’s irritable face and grinned. “Last one, I promise,” she said._ _

__Quentin grumbled, “Better be—we’ve still got to get Will, Meg is waiting—”_ _

__She kissed his cheek and his grumbling stopped. He looked sideways at Eliot, still so unsure what to do with this simple, familial affection. Eliot could have made some effort to save him but he didn’t. He stood back and raised his eyebrows, smiling, until Quentin cleared his throat and patted Isadora on the back._ _

__“I’m having more fun than I expected,” Isadora told him, pulling away. “Thanks for the adventure, Uncle Q. I’m starving. Do you think there’s any goat stew in the galley—” and she wandered off down the hall._ _

__“We’ll get to Will eventually,” Eliot said when she was gone._ _

__“If you just keep cutting the distance you need to travel in half, you’ll never reach your destination,” Quentin said, but he looked less irritated. “It’s fine. She’s having fun. And it is kind of nice to spend this time with her. Seeing one of our descendants be a hero, you know? If I never did anything else in my life, at least I helped, um, create this wildly fearless person who goes out and slays zombie goats for distressed shepherds.”_ _

__Eliot kissed his temple. “Yeah,” he said. “But you’ve slain a few monsters of your own, Q. Don’t discount your own foolhardy heroism.”_ _

__“Except those are usually monsters I woke up somehow,” Quentin said. He pinched the bridge of his nose, waving off Eliot’s protests. “Fine, fine. We don’t need to go over the cost analysis. I guess I could eat—are you ready for dinner?”_ _

__“As long as we’re not eating goat. I’d rather have one of Meg’s sandwiches,” Eliot said with an exaggerated shudder to make Quentin smile, and they followed Isadora down the hall._ _

__#_ _

__Teddy’s son Edward had settled in Fillory’s most cosmopolitan area: the city of Wingrest, which sprawled across a peninsula with sheer, jagged cliffs. The Muntjac approached as the suns were setting. Tiny waterfalls glittered down the cliffs._ _

__“Too many people,” Isadora decided as the Muntjac settled in the river. The docks were busy, a bustling crowd flowing in and out of riverside businesses. But the arrival of the Muntjac by air had attracted more than a few onlookers._ _

__As they docked, Quentin caught sight of a bookstore. He focused on it with the intensity of a bloodhound. He liked Fillorian spellbooks, decried the scarcity of Fillorian textbooks, and—“Maybe they have something new for Meg,” he said. “Hey, the next time we’re back on Earth, we should pick up a bunch of books to bring her. Like, how would nonfiction about, I don’t know—cars—read to her. Right?”_ _

__“The same way it reads to Margo, I imagine,” Eliot said. He leaned beside Quentin at the railing as the Muntjac glided closer to the docks. “You can use her as your test audience.”_ _

__Quentin shook his head. “Wow, way to get me skinned alive.”_ _

__“If High King Margo is a villain, I will protect you,” Isadora promised solemnly. Eliot reached over to ruffle her hair, which she’d left down. It curled in a huge cloud around her head._ _

__“Do you have a weapon in there?” he asked just before his hand made contact._ _

__“No,” Isadora lied, and shifted away._ _

__“This is going to go well,” Eliot said. “I’ve got a good feeling about this. I really do.”_ _

__“I bet they’ve got the new herbal compendium Fen wanted,” Quentin said, still looking at the bookstore, and went to get his wallet._ _

__#_ _

__After Quentin brought his books back to the Muntjac—“Your trophies,” Isadora said approvingly, having watched him hunt through the bookstores stacks for them—they set off in search of the address Meg had given them._ _

__They walked through the city streets as dusk settled in. Wingrest looked more like Earth than anything else in Fillory had, but still seemed to have been lifted directly from location shoots for a fantasy movie. Their route spiraled through poor neighborhoods by the docks to a wealthier business district, and then to the city’s residential center, an area with tall houses separated by lush lawns. There seemed to be a correlation between the number of cute little arched bridges over sparkling streams that they had to cross and the magnitude of the size difference between homes on either side._ _

__“I think Teddy Jr. found some money in the couch cushions,” Eliot said._ _

__Quentin grimaced. “This is the kind of neighborhood where they expect a hostess gift or something just for walking in the door. Do we have something we can bring them?”_ _

__“Got this,” Isadora said, pulling a dagger from her sleeve. It _was_ a very nice dagger, polished and glittering. However, Edward Lewis’s estate had a high metal fence wound around with protective spells; an armed guard at the gate; and a thin, shallow moat. The dagger looked small and cheap in comparison._ _

__“Running water is a good defense against a lot of different spells,” Quentin said defensively when he caught sight of Eliot and Isadora sneering at the moat._ _

__“Not against being a pretentious asshole,” Eliot said, and Isadora nodded._ _

__The guard took their names without changing her expression, then waved them through the gate. The walkway was paved with crushed seashells and lit with lanterns against the dusk. A woman in a crisp, trim uniform waited just out of sight of the guard. She watched them with a cold expression, just a hint of anxiety in the tightness of her mouth and eyes, in the way her hands clenched each other where they sat at her waist._ _

__“Minette?” Quentin asked hopefully, already extending a hand. “I’m Quentin Coldwater, ah, Lewis, I’m—”_ _

__“I’ll bring you to my mistress,” the woman said, sidling out of Quentin’s reach. She nodded to Eliot and Isadora. “Follow me without delay; she _is_ waiting.”_ _

__“Good feelings,” Eliot sing-songed just loudly enough for Quentin to hear. Q shot him a worried glance as they followed the uniformed woman inside._ _

__#_ _

__“I’m sure you have better options than my son,” Minette Lewis-Gristle said. She received them in her study, sitting behind a wide, white, almost opalescent desk. Eliot thought that it might have been fashioned from the polished bone of something enormous: a whale maybe, or another Fillorian creature that he had yet to learn about. Whatever the material was, it glowed in the soft lamplight, as pale and smooth as her skin._ _

__Unlike any of Quentin’s other descendants—at least the ones they’d met so far—she had Quentin’s eyes, but with a very fair complexion and dark hair. Her red lips were pursed in a lemon-sucking sneer. Snow White, but bitchier. Quentin’s coldest, darkest moods made manifest. No wonder the kid had gotten into blood magic: at least blood was warm._ _

__“Uh, nope.” Quentin stood in front of her, awkwardly folding his hands at his waist like the—butler? Assistant? Petrified minion?—who’d let them in. “We need the strongest magicians from each of the family lines—” _ta-da_ , “and that’s Will.”_ _

__Minette stared at him for a long, silent moment, then slid her gaze to Eliot. “King Eliot,” she said, with the faintest possible smile, as if she meant to be ingratiating but couldn’t quite manage it. “I love my son. However, it’s absolutely impossible for me to believe that he’s the _strongest_ magician in our line. Perhaps a demonstration of my daughter Evelong’s skills?”_ _

__“Nope,” Isadora said. She had allowed herself to be steered towards a couch and seated next to the pale and wraithly Evelong, but she seemed incapable of being gracious about it, which Eliot thought was fair: he wouldn’t have liked to get too close to Evelong, either. She looked like she put off a chill. Isadora sat with her arms crossed over her chest, tipped her head at Evelong, and scowled. “I can already tell you, this kid isn’t the one.”_ _

__“I’m...older than you,” Evelong said. She had a high, slow voice, like a turtle someone had fed helium._ _

__Quentin turned and looked at her, then shot a panicked glance at Eliot._ _

__“My dear Minette,” Eliot said, in his plummiest _con the rich and eat them_ voice. “I’m sure that Evelong is the strongest magician in your line—perhaps in all three of the Lewis lines.” He smiled viciously as he lied through his teeth, and it was impossible, but he would have sworn he felt the monster spark in his eyes. “But we’ve been sent to collect Will. I _am_ afraid that High King Margo—you’ve heard of the High King? I assure you she didn’t carry out those unfortunate assassinations _just_ because she wanted to—the High King has authorized us to meet the terms of the spell by whatever means are necessary.”_ _

__He held his hands palms out, feigning powerlessness in the way of a man with all the power in the world. “One of those terms _is_ the collection of you son Will. But I’m sure you won’t miss him. Perhaps it will even be a relief to focus your attention on your more promising child.”_ _

__He leaned closer to her, his smile ice cold. “Why don’t you have him brought to us,” he said politely. “I’m sure the High King will be glad to hear we’ve managed to be so helpful to each other.”_ _

__Minette stared into his eyes. Eliot was pretty sure she hadn’t bought his act and he’d have to escalate—would he need to invoke the talking sloth, too?—but then she sat back in her high-backed seat. “Evelong, go fetch your brother. And dear,” she said with a faint, nasty smile, “do make sure he washes his hands. The results of his magic are so…gruesome.”_ _

__#_ _

__“Uh, so—you’re not what I expected?” Quentin said, when they got Will back to the Muntjac._ _

__Like his mother, Will was pale and slight, almost sickly, like an attractive but tragic Gothic orphan. The unexpected part was that he was dressed like a nurse: a simple shirt and pants that almost looked like scrubs, crisp and white and boring._ _

__“You thought a blood magician should be a basement-dwelling troll with bad skin and terrible hygiene,” Will said mildly. He seemed undisturbed by Quentin’s comment, but he’d seemed undisturbed by anything that had happened to him from the moment Evelong handed him over. “I understand. But the truth is, if you mix the blood of a mandrake with the blood of a bird, even on the hem of your trousers, your results _are_ going to explode. I don’t want to lose a limb. Therefore, I _do_ tend to be fastidious.”_ _

__“Which is fair, totally fair. But no, actually it’s because the other sides of the family are kind of, uh,” Quentin paused, clearly fishing for something inoffensive._ _

__“Offensively hale and hearty,” Eliot said. He draped his arm over Quentin’s shoulder and tugged him close. He smiled at Will, _recognizing_ something in him. He had always been drawn to Quentin’s darker, more myopic personality traits, as well as his inextinguishable light. “The other sides of the family are very much in favor of clean air, fresh living, earnestness—etcetera.”_ _

__“Boring,” Will said. “Yes, that is what I have heard about them.” He eyed Quentin and Eliot, gaze lingering on Eliot analytically. Eliot stood up straighter, holding his head high. Fuck if he was going to be intimidated by some nursing school dropout with a nasty helicopter mom. But he wondered: did Will see it? The last trace of the monster?_ _

__Isadora huffed. “That’s city thinking. Makes you weird.” She eyed her cousin and sneered. “Makes you _weak_.”_ _

__Will dragged his attention off Eliot and smiled at her. “My mother says that boring people are just waiting to be broken.”_ _

__“Right,” Quentin interrupted hurriedly. “Right right. More time to get to know each other later. Yeah. Let’s leave…all that…for later. So, uh.” He smiled, showing off the Muntjac with an awkward flourish. “This is our ship. Home sweet home for—how long, Eliot, five days?”_ _

__“If Isadora behaves,” Eliot drawled. Isadora did not look like she thought she would behave. Her hair was wild and loose, blowing in the breeze, and her arms were crossed over her chest. Her face was set in serious, stubborn lines: like Quentin when he sensed something morally or ethically wrong, and thought someone might try to keep him from doing something about it._ _

__“I’ll stay right here,” Isadora said, watching Will. Will watched her back with calm, bespectacled hazel eyes. “I’ll help keep an eye on him.”_ _

__“I have enough of my own work to keep me occupied.” Will raised his eyebrows, sniffing. “Perhaps I’ll occupy myself with resolving your…smell…issues.”_ _

__“That’d be the corpses,” Quentin said with forced cheer._ _

__Eliot sat back and let Quentin handle the awkwardness. Who knew having teenagers around would be so entertaining? When Teddy had been a teenager, it had taken real effort to rile him up. Eliot’s own teenage years had been such a misery that he didn’t remember enjoying himself at all._ _

__“We’ve tried a couple different preservation spells, but, uh.” Quentin shrugged, “It is what it is, I guess?”_ _

__“It is foul,” Will said. “Take me to them. I can fix this.”_ _

__Quentin shot Eliot a look. He raised an eyebrow and tilted his head toward Isadora. Quentin sighed. “Isadora, why don’t you show him. Tell him about your adventures.”_ _

__Isadora looked like she was considering objecting, then smiled. “Sure, Uncle Quentin,” she said. “Come on. I’ll tell you about everything I’ve killed.”_ _

__“Oh good,” Will said blandly, walking lightly behind her despite his thick-soled clogs. “And I’ll tell you about everything _I’ve_ killed. We can see where we overlap.”_ _

__The second the kids were gone, Eliot beamed. “Quentin, I have to tell you, I wasn’t looking forward to this part of the trip at all? But I. Am. Thrilled. They’re fun, aren’t they.”_ _

__“So fun I’m not sure they’ll both make it to Lewiston alive,” Quentin said, worrying his lip._ _

__Eliot threw an arm over his shoulder. “They’ll be best friends in no time. Do you think the Muntjac already smells better?”_ _

__“…no,” Quentin said, as something crashed down below and Isadora started cursing._ _

__“Well,” Eliot said. He followed Quentin down to the hold to investigate. “We’ll get there. Give them time.”_ _

__#_ _


	4. Chapter 4

Will distracted Isadora thoroughly enough that after dinner, when Quentin slipped away from the table, Eliot could follow without eliciting much comment from the cousins.

“You can’t just go out and kill some magical creature because it’s blood might be useful,” Isadora argued, banging down her mug and spilling red wine on the table. “That’s not an honorable death. You’ll call down seven by seven years of misfortune on yourself!”

“But killing them for trophies doesn’t bring misfortune?” Will said mildly. “Interesting. Do the trophies help people in some _honorable_ way?”

“No, you helped by killing the monster to begin with, and that’s honorable, so—”

“Either way, the creature is dead. I fail to see the—”

Eliot followed Quentin up the stairs, suppressing his smile. 

The moons shone high overhead, stars twinkling in the clear night sky. The Muntjac’s bow cut through thin wisps of low clouds, forests and villages and homesteads veiled beneath them. The air was crisp and clear. Quentin stood as far forward on the deck as he could get, leaning his elbows on the rail, watching Fillory fall away as their ship flew her steady course to the sea.

“Did you ever do the thing?” Eliot asked. He went to stand beside Quentin, leaning down with him, crossing his ankles and cocking his hip to nudge Q’s. 

Quentin shook his head. The breeze tousled his hair and he reached up to gather it in his hand and hold it back. “Thought about it,” he admitted. “Stood here and thought, like, why not? But it seemed kind of dangerous without someone to—you know.”

Eliot nodded. “To hold you up. Be the Jack to your Rose. Be your wings.”

Quentin shrugged. “Sure. Close enough. And I wasn’t in the mood to be my own wings. Not...just then.” 

Not when Eliot had sent him off on a quest by himself, one he’d been excited to share, even though Eliot had _rejected_ him. If Eliot had the ability to go back in time and change one thing, just one thing—well, the list was long, but finding a way to go on the boating quest with Quentin would be on it.

He straightened and took a step back, motioning to the bow. “No time like the present.”

Quentin laughed, but his cheeks flushed, too. “You can’t be serious, El.”

“As serious as an argument about a floating door,” Eliot promised. “Get up here.”

“Are you—no.” Quentin wavered, looking up from under his lashes, clearly half-wanting to go for it and half-afraid Eliot was waiting to make fun of him for being so cheesy. Eliot understood, as someone who’d been made fun of plenty when he was growing up. And it wasn’t like Eliot had never made fun of him for being a nerd, too. But Eliot’s mockery had always come from a place of attraction so deep it was almost mortifying, which had developed into something sickeningly soft and fond over time. Quentin was a total nerd, but he was _Eliot’s_ nerd.

“I am _yes_ ,” he said. He reached out and grabbed Quentin’s hand, hustled him close and turned him to the bow. Quentin went with a shy eagerness that was almost exciting enough to sidetrack Eliot. Sure, his goal was to pin Quentin to the deck and kiss him a thousand times, but they had something to do _first_ , he told himself sternly. He helped guide Quentin, still laughing and protesting and _eager_ , to stand in the open space of the bow, toes up on the edge of the deck, the wind in his hair and his weight half in Eliot’s hands.

“I’m flying,” he said, deadpan.

“No, come on, commit,” Eliot urged him. “Be the best Kate Winslet you can be, Quentin.”

“Don’t you think you’re a better Kate Winslet,” Quentin complained. He wiggled like he intended to sidle away from the bow, but not hard enough to actually _go_ anywhere. “I mean, if you want to micromanage, if you’re that committed to the realism of the moment, you can come up here and—”

“I would never get in the way of you and your thing,” Eliot promised. He held on a little tighter and tucked his face into the crook of Quentin’s shoulder, hoping Q could feel his smile. “Now, just do it. _Commit_.”

Quentin heaved a put-upon sigh. “I’m flying,” he said with a little more enthusiasm.

“Again. Really put some life into it. Stick your arms out a little straighter, maybe that will help you feel it.”

Quentin held his arms up a little higher, a little straighter. Eliot wrapped one arm across his hips to hold him close and tight, safe from the push and pull of the wind, steady against the Muntjac’s forward motion, silhouetted against the stars. 

The change in posture seemed to help: “I’m _flying_ ,” Quentin said. 

“One more time,” Eliot urged him, laying his cheek against the softness of Quentin’s flannel shirt. He felt Quentin laugh as much as he heard it. His smile widened.

“I’m _flying_!” Quentin yelled. He tipped his head back, hair whipping away from his face, and laughed again. 

“Who are you?” Eliot yelled back at him, laughing too: at Quentin, at himself, at the joy of the moment.

“I’m the king of the world!” Quentin said with conviction, and Eliot, holding him tight—holding him up—believed him.

“Is this a sex thing?” Isadora asked with interest. Quentin startled so hard he almost went over the side despite Eliot’s grip on him. “Oh, sorry, Uncle Quentin. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Well, I was hoping it would _become_ a sex thing,” Eliot said. He turned his head to glare at her while he helped Quentin down from the edge of the deck. He was afraid the moment had been ruined and Quentin would feel self-conscious, but when Quentin turned in his arms, he was still smiling.

“It’s from a movie,” Quentin explained. He held his hair back with his hand again, slanting a smile at Eliot. The smile was familiar: wry but also a little heated, curious, wondering. Eliot had seen it before, when Teddy interrupted them while they were making out, or talking about making out, or thinking about making out—as if he had some kind of sixth sense for when they were focusing more on each other than on him. “It’s kind of a funny moment that people on Earth joke about. Not a big deal. Did you guys need us for something?”

“It’s romantic,” Eliot said with great dignity. “And I don’t care what they need. You’re old enough to take care of yourselves, kids. Go away.”

“Well, actually,” Isadora said, and launched into a long explanation of how Will was wrong in a way that required their intervention. Eliot watched Quentin watch her—nodding along, hanging on her every word very seriously—and sighed. Well, at least they’d gotten to do the thing. One more act of seduction interrupted, but one more act of contrition to cross off the list. 

#

By the second day, the Muntjac _did_ smell better, and Isadora and Will had taken their scrapping down from lions fighting over a kill to cats tussling over the best spot on the couch.

Isadora’s magic had located a princess who needed a knight and she was gung-ho about going off to help her. Eliot planned to make her take Will, excited about the opportunity for he and Q to have the Muntjac to themselves.

Quentin stood in front of the mirror in the state room, squinting at his reflection. His new books were piled on the table behind him: some open, some set aside for Meg. His hands were covered in ink from making notes on new spells. “Do you think they’ve made me go gray?” he asked Eliot, who was standing at his shoulder, considering how they looked, reflected there together: more like themselves than they had since they’d defeated the monster. Eliot tweaked his own hair fastidiously. “I’m exhausted. It’s like having a little kid again, but double, and they’re deadly?”

“I think you could sail around the world and not really get tired of this,” Eliot said, smiling at him. It was cute of Quentin to complain when he was visibly thriving under the attention of his teenaged descendants. He’d learned how to duck a punch from Isadora just that morning; Will was teaching him small, delicate blood spells, things that didn’t merit much distaste and might come in handy. “I think you love every part of it.”

The kids hadn’t quite left yet, but Eliot couldn’t resist the opportunity. He took a slow step closer, leaning in, so that he crossed the line between friendly hovering and looming with intent. He kept his gaze focused on Quentin’s in the mirror, and whispered in his ear, “Including me.”

Quentin twitched—a shiver suppressed—and licked his lip. His eyes went narrow and dark. “I thought you’d given up on me.”

“Not planning on it.” Eliot brushed Quentin’s hair back. Still watching him in the mirror, he dropped a faint kiss on his neck. It was just a whisper of a touch, but Quentin’s shoulder jerked up and he caught his breath. He closed his eyes. Eliot rested a hand on his side, drawing him closer.

“Fine,” Quentin said, a rasp in his voice that he coughed to clear away. “Fine. If you want to fuck, let’s do it.” He stepped away and turned around, raising his eyebrows at Eliot. “I’m not opposed to fucking you,” he said. He tossed both his shirts on the floor, then started to toe off his shoes while he unbuckled his belt.

“That’s…so far from the place I want to be with you,” Eliot said, frowning. “’Not opposed to fucking you’ is a criminally low bar. Literally criminal, I’m fairly certain.” He watched as Quentin’s belt went flying, buckle clattering on the Muntjac’s polished, golden floors. Quentin started to unzip his pants and Eliot shook his head. 

“I mean, it’s fun to fuck you.” Quentin slid his pants down his legs and kicked them to the side. “We always had a good time, right?” He stood in his boxers and crossed his arms defensively over his bare chest, his flat brown nipples pebbling in the chill, sunlight streaking across his chest from the portholes. “So let’s have some fun,” he said, chin down. “I’m game.”

“That’s not what I’m asking for.” Eliot approached him cautiously. His hands hovered over Quentin’s bare shoulders, which were rounded defensively and tucked up so close to his ears. “I don’t want to have some fun, Q. I want—everything. I want what we had. I’m in _love_ with you.”

Quentin looked him in the eyes. “That’s what you think now, because of your happy place. But maybe you were right a year ago. I thought I was in love with you, but I had plenty of time to think about it? And I realized that I loved you—I do love you—but I was _in love_ with a memory of you.”

More than anything else Quentin had said to him since they’d defeated the monster, that _hurt_ : shades of the rejection he’d been afraid of all along. Eliot dropped his hands to his sides. Quentin’s face softened, saddened.

“And now maybe you think you’re in love with me, but it’s just a memory of me,” he said more gently. “Real me, real you, right now we’re having totally different experiences than our other selves. We’re living totally different lives. We’re not in love with each other—not the way we were then.”

Eliot blinked. He was so taken aback by Quentin’s complete misreading of the situation that for a moment, he just stood there like an idiot. “Maybe not, but only because it takes fifty years of loving someone to get where we were at the end,” he said. “I’d say we’ve got a head start.”

“A head start doesn’t mean anything when you’re going in different directions,” Quentin said.

Eliot closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, then pinched the bridge of his nose. No one in any world was more obstinate. “Q, I’ve been chasing after you for weeks. It got so bad that Margo kicked us out of our own palace. Do you really think I’d do that for a memory?”

Quentin shrugged. “If you wanted to get into the memory’s pants, sure. So let’s just do that and get it out of our systems. Then you can stop all the rest of this, and I can stop—whatever—and we’ll do Teddy’s spell and go back to Whitespire. Then everything will be fine.”

Eliot stared at him, truly almost admiring how badly Quentin had it all wrong. “I was in love with you long before we shared that lifetime together,” he said. “I never once tried to hide my attraction to you. I’ve been trying to seduce you since we met. Are you forgetting to account for all of that in your new, tragic take on our relationship?”

“You’re like that with everyone!” Quentin said. “You’re always looking, and touching, and standing too close, and did I mention the touching because—”

“Am I?” Eliot asked, watching him with steady eyes. “Am I really, Quentin? Or is it pretty much just you and Margo?”

“And the ex-boyfriend who tried to murder a whole bunch of us,” Quentin said, defensive. “And—” He stopped, stumped.

“The ex-boyfriend a god used to seduce me?” Eliot rolled his eyes. “That’s your one counterexample?”

“One counterexample is all it takes to disprove a statement,” Quentin said stubbornly.

“Then let me disprove yours,” Eliot said, and settled his hands gently on Quentin’s shoulders. “I’ve never really been in love with anyone before, so I’ve never been the way I am with you.” He brushed his thumbs over Quentin’s collarbones and took a deep, slow breath in time with the movement of his hands. “I didn’t recognize it for what it was. All I knew was that you were important. I liked to watch you sulk and overreact to almost everything. I liked the person I could be in your eyes. And when you kissed me on the mosaic, I thought—well, I’m going to ruin this, but he wants it—so why not?”

Eliot dropped one hand to put his thumb to the smooth skin there, just feeling the quickness of his pulse pounding. He watched Quentin watch him—mouth open, eyes wide and cautious. 

Eliot nodded. He pressed down a little harder, feeling Quentin’s heartbeat race. “And I did. I ruined it.” 

For a moment, they just watched each other. The only connection between them was Eliot’s thumb on the hollow of Quentin’s throat.

Eliot ducked his head, searching Quentin’s eyes. “But it took me _more_ than a lifetime to fuck up, Q. Did I panic at the thought of getting to have another fifty years? At the idea of having to try not to kill your feelings for me all over again? Yeah. Not because I didn’t love you after spending a lifetime figuring out how to have you. Because I’d already beat the odds by not fucking it up the first time.” He smiled. “That’s just not how it works for dumb, gay farmboys from rural Indiana, Q. We don’t win the lottery. We _certainly_ don’t win it twice.”

“…oh,” Quentin said.

“Oh,” Eliot agreed. “So _this_ —” he gestured to Quentin’s clothes, scattered across the floor. “This isn’t all I’m after, Q. I don’t just want to have fun. I’m not just stuck in an old memory loop. I want you: here and now, and happy to have me.”

He dropped his hand. “I’m sorry I let you think anything else.”

Quentin stood mostly-naked in front of him, blinking. He started and stopped a half dozen replies, his mouth opening and closing, his brow furrowed. Eliot bent down and picked up his pants, handed them over. “As much as it pains me to say this—you should probably put on your pants,” he said, smiling wryly.

“Eliot,” Quentin said, slow, considering. He reached for his pants, but his hand didn’t connect. “Did you ever really understand how much I wanted to be with you? Like, in those whole fifty years, in every second that you’ve spent thinking about it since, did you ever _realize_ —”

A rabbit appeared on the table. It scrabbled as it slid down a teetering stack of books, and knocked another stack over. 

Eliot and Quentin startled and turned to stare at it; it stared back at them with inscrutable black eyes before hopping toward them. It twitched its nose and stood on its hind legs, front paws tucked in.

“MEG SICK. MAYBE DYING. COME FAST,” it shouted. Its urgent, rasping voice was loud enough to echo throughout the Muntjac.

Quentin jumped and grabbed Eliot’s arm. “What—”

“MEG SICK. MAYBE DYING. COME FAST,” the rabbit repeated.

Time seemed to move strangely for a moment: it felt like it took forever to send a reply, but Eliot knew he had leapt forward and grabbed the rabbit so quickly that it startled in his hands. He vaguely remembered asking for more information, but the words had come by auto-pilot. All he could think was, _no, not Meg, no_ and _Quentin_. The second the rabbit was gone--or maybe an hour after it left, Eliot couldn’t say for sure--he turned and reached for Quentin.

Isadora appeared at the door. She was dressed for adventuring; that was right, Eliot thought wildly, she’d been preparing to go find a princess. She held an unsheathed dagger in her hand and looked around as if she expected them to be under attack. “What’s happening?”

“Not sure,” Eliot said. Quentin was staring into space, one hand over his heart, pants dangling from the other. “Something’s wrong with Meg—she had a broken leg when we got to Lewiston. She’s very old, you know. Broken bones in the elderly are—”

“Manticore’s blood could fix it,” Will said, mildly interested, from behind Isadora’s shoulder. “I know a spell. Well, I know three spells, but you probably only require the one.”

“Great,” Quentin said, jolting back to awareness. He seemed to realize his pants were in his hand and started struggling into them, fucking it up twice before he figured out his feet. “Let’s do it.”

“The only problem being I don’t have any manticore blood,” Will said, regretful.

Isadora sighed, rolled her eyes, and said, “ _Well_ , I was going to ignore the nest of them because Uncle Q’s been so stressed about time, but if we take a teeny-tiny detour—”

“Take it,” Quentin said. “Whatever you need.”

“I’ll need some of your blood,” Will said. He smiled serenely when Quentin turned to him with wild eyes. “Just a small amount. To help attune my spellwork. Come downstairs with me. I have a sterile setup—and, well, since you’re already shirtless, perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I took a _few_ other samples: just a chest hair, maybe a—"

“Will,” Eliot said, shaking his head. “Not the time.”

Will sniffed. “Why were you shirtless anyway?” he asked Quentin, leading him to the door.

“Very long story,” Quentin said. “I won’t tell you any of it.”

Isadora looked at Eliot. “My mother said Aunt Meg said you were having marital problems,” she said sympathetically. “Have you tried sweeping him off his feet? It’s worked for me."

“I think he just started to sweep me off mine,” Eliot said. He took a deep breath and then headed for the Muntjac’s armory. “I’ll plot your course change, Isadora,” he said to her over his shoulder, not waiting for her to catch up. “We need to get there as fast as we can.”

#

The manticores were small, and young, and really very charming. They had flat faces, sort of like lions but also sort of human, with round green eyes, and their bodies were kittenish, striped cream and orange. Their poisonous tails were segmented and lashed viciously, but they were stubby, easy to avoid if a person were in the mood to pick one up and cuddle it to their chest like a puppy.

“I thought they were vicious predators,” Eliot said, doing just that. He scratched the manticore under its chin. It snapped at his finger.

“Don’t let them taste you or they’ll be hunting you down for seven generations,” Isadora snapped. She took the manticore from him and held it by the scruff of its neck. It curled up, sullenly trying to bite her, while she drew her dagger with her other hand.

“Wait,” Quentin said, suddenly doubtful. “Are you sure you have to _kill_ it—”

“Oh, the whole nest needs to go,” Will said. “Honestly, even if they don’t get a taste of you, they’ll hunt your smell for three generations. And the adults are vicious. You encounter a manticore nest, the only option is to wipe it out.”

“Best to do it now,” he and Isadora said in tandem, and then they looked at each other in surprise.

“I’ll just,” Quentin said faintly, “I’ll just wait. Outside the nest. Out there.”

“I’ll come with you.” Eliot nodded and straightened his cravat. “We’ll go keep an eye out for the parents.”

“Oh, they’ve already eaten their mother, and _she_ ate their father,” Isadora said absently. She hoisted up the manticore that dangled from her hands; Will shoved a large bowl underneath it, and Eliot and Quentin hustled out of the nest before they could see—

A yelp. They looked at each other, guilty. Eliot said, “When we get back to Earth, I’ll set a monthly donation to an animal shelter.”

“Good idea,” Q said. He winced at the second yelp. “I’ll just...give them my entire savings account.”

It only took a few minutes for Isadora and Will to finish their work and leave the nest, each holding a handle of the big bowl of blood. Eliot was glad to see that Isadora hadn’t tried to bring a body back for her trophy collection.

She made a face when he mentioned it. “They’re not exactly trophy material,” she said. “Too small. Too cute.”

Quentin went a little green. “Too small,” he echoed. “Too cute.”

“It’s not like you never killed a monster before, Uncle Quentin,” Isadora said, oblivious, as Quentin swallowed hard and looked away. Eliot reached out to rest a steadying hand on his back. Quentin jerked like he might take a step away, then breathed deep and relaxed into the touch.

“Uncle Quentin is soft-hearted,” Will said. 

He wasn’t wrong, Eliot thought. That trait had intensified over time, as if every battle with a monster had somehow left Quentin more open and compassionate than before; as if the fight with _the_ monster had broken him down to his elemental pieces, and softness was one of them. Not that he wasn’t strong, or stubborn, or wouldn’t do what was necessary when the time came--but he knew about being driven by the dark forces inside, and couldn’t seem to help but empathize. 

Will tilted his head, watching Quentin. “Don’t think about the manticores,” he advised. “Think about your granddaughter. And the village children the manticore would have tried to eat in a year or so, of course.”

Quentin’s color slowly started coming back. “Meg. Right. Do you—did you get enough of what you need?”

“Oh, quite.” Will smiled at Isadora, satisfied. “My cousin is very efficient with a blade.”

“And my cousin has a very effective exsanguination spell,” Isadora said, equally pleased.

“Oh God, they’ve bonded,” Eliot said to Quentin, but he felt just as smug about them as they suddenly were about each other.

“Can I watch you build the healing spell?” Isadora asked Will. Will nodded, smiling at her over the cauldron of blood they were lugging back to the Muntjac. 

“You can _help_ ,” he said, and Quentin and Eliot, exchanging glances, fell back to let the cousins plan their attack on the delicate, painstaking work of a healing spell.

“I can’t believe these terrifying people share my DNA,” Quentin said. “Diluted quite a bit now, but still—I had something to do with this?”

“I can believe it,” Eliot said. He watched the cousins climb the Muntjac’s gangplank: Will below and Isadora above, careful not to spill a drop of their precious cargo. The sun shone on their hair. The wind carried their serious voices, already deep into a discussion of the incantations, and how to twist one’s wrist for maximum effectiveness as an antibiotic.

Eliot reached down and took Quentin’s hand. “They’re very brave,” he said. “And curious, and sharp, and true to their own moral codes, and—they’re powerful and good, Quentin. Yes, I can believe they’re yours.”

“Thanks,” Quentin said after a silent moment. 

Eliot squeezed his hand. “Oh, absolutely any time.”

#

Maggie took a shuddering breath. “It’s bad, Grandpa Quentin,” she said. She had come to meet them at the dock, waving anxiously as the Muntjac settled down to float just above the river. “Her fever is severe. She hasn’t been lucid in two days. She’s wasting away. The infection is—we’d take the leg, if it seemed like it wouldn’t make things worse—”

“Nonsense,” Will said brusquely. “Leave that leg precisely where it ought to be. Cousin Isadora and I will set her on her feet in no time at all. If you’ll lead us to her, of course.”

“Can hardly do any magic from _downtown_ ,” Isadora sniffed. She glanced around the village common disapprovingly. “Dry your tears, cousin, and take us to Aunt Meg.”

“They have a spell,” Quentin told a bewildered Maggie as they walked from the Muntjac to Meg’s house. Passers-by looked at them with sympathy, and Quentin smiled uncomfortably at them. Eliot just stared until people moved out of their path.

Quentin’s fake smile fell away at the sight of Meg. She seemed to have aged since they left, and almost no sign of health or vitality remained. Her skin was dry and pale, except the hectic fever flush high on her cheekbones. She seemed thinner, and smaller, as if she had diminished a little more with every exhale since they’d last seen her.

“Move, move, move, yes, thank you,” Will said, folding the blanket down to Meg’s stomach. “Isadora, do you have the—ah, lovely. Has everyone said their goodbyes?”

Octavia leapt forward, her eyes wild. “What are these children _planning_? Is this _safe_?”

“Oh, thoroughly safe,” Will lied with absolutely no attempt to fake conviction. Eliot reached for Quentin: the kids hadn’t mentioned that their spell was _dangerous_. “I recommend you kiss her goodbye. Just out of an abundance of caution, of course.”

“Of course,” Eliot said, breathless like the air had been knocked out of him. “An abundance of caution. The Lewis family trait.”

Isadora and Will traded confused glances. “Actually, the family is known for an abundance of reckless decisions that somehow work out,” Isadora said. “That’s probably how this will resolve, too. But I suggest you say your goodbyes in case luck is with some other magician today.”

“Luck is dead,” Quentin murmured. “A monster killed her.”

Q sat in the chair near Meg’s head when Octavia silently stood up and offered it to him. He reached for Meg’s hand and leaned over her, pressing his forehead to hers. Eliot stood silently behind him with a hand on his shoulder, his heart rattling in his chest.

“Meg,” Quentin whispered. “Meg, we brought Nuzzi and Minette’s kids. Don’t you want to wake up and meet them?”

Meg didn’t respond. Her mouth hung open a little, and her hand twitched on the blanket, but she wasn’t—she wasn’t _there_.

Quentin’s chest shuddered under Eliot’s hand. He wasn’t crying exactly, just breathing like it hurt: a man who’d lost more than he knew how to bear, but somehow had to carry on.

“I love you,” he whispered to her. He brushed her hair back from her temple and studied her. He bent down to kiss her cheek with all the soft, lingering love he’d lavished on her when she was their son’s infant daughter. “Little Meg. Thank you, sweetheart. Thank you for waiting for us.”

He sniffed and rose from the chair, offering it to Eliot. Eliot sat. He held his hand up so that Quentin would hold it.

“Take less time than Uncle Quentin,” Will advised absently, preparing the potion on Meg’s bedside table. His mortar and pestle sat on top of her stack of her life-on-Earth fantasy novels: the book on top appeared to be about construction equipment. Will didn’t seem to notice. “This will work anyway,” he said. “Abundance of caution.”

Eliot looked down at Meg. He thought she still seemed somehow irascible, as if she was far too stubborn to ever die—would bitch Death out if he tried it. But her breaths were slow and almost imperceptible. When he touched her cheek, it felt slack and hot, more fevered than a human could survive.

“Give this a chance to work, Meg, even though it isn’t your idea,” he murmured to her. Then he bent to kiss her, seeing the baby he’d known and the elderly woman he’d just started to know; somehow seeing her at all the ages in between, strong and stubborn and brave. Quentin’s granddaughter—their granddaughter. Their Meg.

“Up,” Isadora said, not unkindly, as she stole his chair out from under him. Eliot went to stand with Quentin and Octavia, adding himself to their tight, clinging hug. Will and Isadora went to work.

They painted Meg’s hairline, her hands, and her injured leg with the manticore’s blood, and Quentin’s blood, and some ground bone—Eliot hadn’t asked its provenance. Then they each took a step back. They stood on opposite sides of Meg’s bed, staring at each other.

Will nodded. Isadora took a breath. Their hands began to fly, shapes in combinations that made Eliot raise his eyebrows and occasionally wince. They cast mostly in silence, breaking out into simultaneous staccato phrases once, twice—a third time, even sharper—but otherwise the only sound was their rapid, panting breaths. They raced through the fingerwork, repeating the same phrases over and over.

They were strong. Eliot hadn’t really felt their power before, but it drew up tight in Meg’s house, pulling everyone towards them like black holes. Eliot felt it in his stomach, electric and uncomfortable, and wondered: had Teddy known? Had Teddy had some sense of how powerful his descendants would be? He imagined adding Maggie to the spell’s power and was almost glad she didn’t know what was happening. The house might not have been able to withstand the pressure.

A sudden crescendo: Will and Isadora speaking continuously, the walls rattling with the echo of their voices. Meg’s body arched in the bed. Her bad leg pulled up toward the ceiling, red and swollen and pulsing with magic. Eliot felt his stomach turn. Quentin gasped against his chest, turning his head away from the sight, and—

And the spell broke.

The spell broke and everyone took a deep breath, gasping together—

Including Meg. 

She gasped. Her eyes opened, and she stared up at her ceiling for a long, motionless moment, before—

“Well, _that’s_ better,” she rasped, and turned her head to look curiously at them all. Her eyes lingered on Will, on Isadora and Quentin and Octavia and Maggie, on the relatives gathered fearfully in the hall.

She held her thin, thin hand out to Eliot and Quentin and said, “Took you long enough, my dears.”

“You’re a very ungrateful young woman,” Eliot said with mock-sternness, but he and Quentin wrapped their hands around hers, and held on and on and on.

#

It took a few days for Meg to get out of bed and hobble around well enough to feel up to the trip to the cottage—but only a few days. In that time, she gained weight and color back. Her skin seemed softer, her eyes brighter. It wasn’t until she was fully well that Eliot realized how sick she’d already been when they met her.

“Well of course I knew I was sick,” she told Quentin when he tried, clumsily, to chide her for letting things get so bad. “But I had no hope without these young people, did I? Not even you and Papa could have handled that magic—if you’d even found it in time.” She sniffed. “That wasn’t the spell Daddy intended them to do, and of course it would have been better if my Maggie had participated, but it worked well enough.”

“Absolutely,” Quentin said. He hugged her for the fourth time that day.

The cottage looked the same as when they’d left it. Eliot realized with a jolt that they’d stopped there only a few weeks ago. Fall had crept on a little more and the blanket of leaves crunched thicker underfoot. But otherwise it looked the same: the windows were broken, the roof caving in, the chimney standing at a crooked angle.

“You _lived_ in _this_?” Will prowled the grounds, fascinated. “You and great-grandmother Arielle? And you raised a _child_ here?”

“This is the size of his mother’s study,” Eliot explained to Meg, who was working up considerable feelings of offense.

“And what does she study there?” Meg asked darkly.

“Oh, world domination,” Will said, matter-of-fact. “I was glad to get away before she used me to get it. I won’t be going back,” he said to Quentin and Eliot, whirling around to fix them with a sharp look. Every descendant in Lewiston had seemingly made it their mission to feed him and make him take walks in the sunshine. He seemed to have grown a couple inches in response, Eliot had noticed. Like a tree in the springtime. He even had some color in his cheeks. “I didn’t mind so much before, when I thought everyone was at least a little like her, but now—”

“Look at you, doing good,” Isadora said. She chucked him under the chin and almost knocked him off his feet.

“I’d always have _preferred_ to do good,” he complained, rubbing his chin. “My magic isn’t inherently _bad_ , you can do good with it. I don’t understand why everyone’s got it so wrong. It’s just a little—”

“You went through three cows last week,” Maggie said.

“—it’s just _some amount_ of blood,” Will said.

Meg sniffed. “If you three are ready,” she said. “I’m quite curious about Daddy’s spell, and I am _not_ getting any younger.”

“You did, actually,” Will said. “The spell reset you to a time before the break so you’re technically—”

“I’m not getting _any more patient_ ,” Meg said loudly, and clapped her hands, gathering them all together.

“You here,” she said to Quentin, consulting a diagram sketched on one of the last pages of Teddy’s book in a strong but shaky hand. The end of Teddy’s work, Eliot thought, and he let out a slow breath. 

Meg shot him a sharp glance, but her hand was gentle on his arm as she hauled him where she wanted him. “And you here.” She positioned Eliot standing across from him, an arms-length away. “Look at each other,” she commanded them. Eliot was fairly certain that wasn’t written into the spell, but he didn’t mind doing it anyway.

He held Q’s gaze steadily. Quentin looked at him, then at the ground, back at him, at the trees—twitchy in a familiar, hunted way that made Eliot want to chase him, urge him on, demand his attention and keep it. The reward of Quentin’s full, confident focus was always worth the effort it took to cajole, bully, or seduce him into it.

Eventually Quentin settled. He took a deep breath, focused on Eliot. They stared at each other, still and quiet, while Meg and the kids bustled around them.

“This is a fairly classic bipiddy-bopaddy-boo.” Will studied the spell sheet Meg had given him, copied from Teddy’s book. He practiced the hand gestures slowly, mouthing the words as he went. “Not the strongest varietal, either. But an interesting hook—here, do you see?” He pointed out the work to Maggie and Isadora, who crowded close and looked over his shoulder.

“A memory hook,” Quentin said, dragging his attention away from Eliot. “Do that bit again—yeah, do you see it? What kind of memory hook do you guys think it is?”

The kids all practiced it again, frowning at their own and each other’s hands. “Good,” Isadore finally announced. She curled her fingers again through the end. “There’s a good memory woven in.”

“Family,” Maggie said. “There’s something about—well. It’s not entirely happy. There’s a conflicting chord here if you look—but family, yes.”

“Love,” Will said. “Great-grandfather Teddy was a sentimentalist through and through.” He eyed Quentin and Eliot. “Wonder where he got that from. But do you see it there, love three times three? A branch for each of his parents, each of his children, and each of us. Well, at least it’s an interesting take on the concept of a triple bind.”

“See, there’s a lot of information packed into the construction of a spell.” Quentin smiled at Eliot, tremulous. “Still think my school idea is silly?”

“Ask me again if we make it back alive from their clumsy spellcasting,” Eliot said, rolling his eyes. It seemed unlikely that any spell Teddy could come up with would do them any harm—unless it backfired. Although he hadn’t been skillful, he had been both well-meaning and thorough, so that seemed unlikely.

Eliot shifted to face Quentin more fully when Maggie asked. He took Quentin’s hands when Will said, vaguely disgusted, that they wouldn’t be able to do without that connection. He closed his eyes when Isadora barked an order—

Closed his eyes—

“Papa,” Teddy said. “Dad. You made it.”

Eliot opened his eyes. He found himself at the cottage as it had been, dressed in his old, comfortable Fillorian clothes.

And. And Teddy. He was young again, preparing to leave home for the first time. His eyes bright and sweet, kind and serious—what a gentle young man, Eliot thought, seeing him like he was a stranger. What a lovely young man. What a good man he and Quentin and Arielle had raised.

“What is this,” Quentin rasped. He sounded afraid.

“A lucid memory tied to a wish, trapped in a bubble,” Teddy said. He looked around and smiled a little at the sight of the cottage. His memory of it wasn’t quite the same as Eliot’s: it seemed larger and even more cozy. The differences made Eliot’s heart ache—was this how Teddy had seen their home? 

Teddy turned back to them. “I wish the real me knew how it had turned out. It took me a long time to come up with the layers of spellwork and I was never quite sure it would come together. I hope you like it.”

Quentin swallowed heavily. “I love it. I just love to see you. I’m so glad to see you, Teddy. How were you? How—”

“I lived quite a bit longer than you did,” Teddy said. “It would be difficult to relay all the details and my time here in this memory will be short. It was very difficult to create a simulacrum of myself—the cottage was much easier. But my old age was good, Dad. I was happy. I died easy. As easy as you both: in my sleep.”

“Good,” Quentin breathed. He took a staggering step towards their son. “Good. Good, Teddy. I’m so glad.”

“Thank you for finding a way to tell us,” Eliot said. “Meg said—but it’s different, it’s better to hear it from you.”

“Of course,” Teddy said. He smiled. “I knew you would feel that way. If I could have found a way to do this so that the real me could see the two of you one more time—but that’s not why we’re here. I’m going to have to leave soon. But the rest of this wish will exist for a while longer. I had hoped—” He gestured toward the cottage, bathed in cool spring sunshine, green grass growing and leaves rustling in the breeze. “Well, I hope you’ll enjoy a memory of what was.”

He paused, corrected himself. “Was, is, could have been,” he said. “Whichever of those you need, by the time you arrive.”

“Is,” Eliot murmured. “It’s lovely. It’s—what a lovely day you remembered, Teddy.”

“Come here,” Quentin said to the both of them. Eliot gathered them up, felt their arms strong around him. He tipped his head against Teddy’s. He breathed in the crisp air, and listened to Quentin say, “I love you, I love you,” until Teddy’s memory faded and left them alone once more.

The beauty of all life. Eliot hadn’t gotten to know the solution to the puzzle the first time around, but he knew it now.

He _knew_ it now.

Eliot leaned back and looked down at Quentin, who looked up at him, wet-eyed and flushed. He brushed Quentin’s hair back from his temples, watching his fingers sift through it. He felt the strange déjà vu of knowing how it would feel to touch Q like this when his fingers were knotted with arthritis, and Quentin’s hair was long and gray.

"We'd never have known about the beauty of all life without each other," Eliot murmured. He looked into Quentin’s eyes. "The time loop, the mosaic, the cottage—all of that was just set dressing. You and I, we were the beauty."

Quentin took a step back. Eliot let him go, feeling completely still and calm inside for the first time in so long—as if the monster's last traces couldn't exist here, in Teddy's wish—while Quentin watched him, solemn, thoughtful. Eliot was right, which had repercussions; he’d spoken something true, which was the greatest and hardest magic. That would be enough for Q or it wouldn’t, but it was enough for Eliot. Whatever happened next would be what _should_.

Quentin paced away. He stood in the center of the mosaic, his hands resting on his hips. The sand was half-covered in tiles, as close to interlocking spirals as they could have made it. Eliot didn't remember this pattern in particular, but he remembered their spiral era: ten or eleven years into the time loop. They'd started letting Teddy help design the layouts. Eliot would come out of the cottage in the cool mornings, yawning, stretching, to find them at work already. Teddy was always so excited by his designs. He and Quentin would stand together in the dappled sunshine, heads bent, planning their approach.

Eliot thought that those days had probably been the closest they'd ever come to completing the mosaic, before the end.

"I'm not going to pretend I knew that all along," Quentin said, turning back to face him. “I figured it out while the monster had you. That day we remembered, I was just, like, _finally_. I know what relationship will work. I know who will work. I don’t have to be alone my whole life. But if we'd jumped back into it from that day, I don't know if it would have been—I don't think it would have been right. I think we’d have fucked it up. As awful as it was, the—what did you call it, the trial separation—gave me time to sort things out.”

Eliot tipped his head down. "You didn't deserve some of what I said to you that day, though."

Quentin snorted, rubbing a hand across his chin. "I mean, how many times had I sucked your dick by then, Eliot? For you to imply that I was too _straight_ to be asking you for a real relationship was just like, patently absurd. You know?"

Eliot gave him an apologetic pout. "I'm sorry, Q. After fifty years, I should have realized you were different than all the other straight guys who'd sucked my dick."

“Oh my God," Quentin muttered. He rolled his eyes. "Why do you have a harder time accepting my sexuality than _I_ do?"

"The answer to almost any question you have to ask me about this is, 'Because I was trying to make your inevitable rejection easier to survive,'" Eliot said. "Just FYI. A conversational shortcut, if you want it. So, uh. Do you still think I was right to turn you down?"

Quentin took a deep breath, blew it out slow. "Then? Yeah. It wasn’t until you were gone and I still had to _look_ at you, _all the time_ , that I realized, you know. That I just wanted _you_. And I, uh." He swallowed hard, looking away. His shoulders pulled up tight and close to his ears.

Poor dumb, nervous baby, Eliot thought, watching him. How can he still have no idea that I'm a sure thing?

A breeze whispered through the trees. It rustled leaves, blowing Quentin's hair in front of his face. He ignored it, crossed his arms over his chest and shrugged. "I wasn’t sure that you would ever really feel that. For me, not just a memory of me.”

Eliot could see it happening: Quentin gathered up his bravery, his strength, his generosity. He tipped his chin up and looked Eliot in the eye. He said, “I do love you, Eliot. And if you want what I want, and you want it _now_ , then we should—we should do it. Take our second chance. What else do we have to lose?”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Eliot said. He moved slowly toward Quentin, memorizing the way he looked: so full of hope and trepidation, the suns setting behind him, the beauty of all life at his feet. “I was going to spend the rest of my life being very pathetic at you if you didn’t. It would have been horrible. Margo would have been _very_ ashamed of me. Come here.”

Quentin’s face had lit up with a slow, genuine smile. He held out his hand for Eliot to take. “I have one request.”

“Anything,” Eliot said, leaning down to kiss him.

“Let’s go inside,” Quentin said. “To our bed. One last time.”

“One last time,” Eliot agreed. He let Quentin drag him into the cottage they’d turned into a home together, to their old bed that they’d made together, to their old life that they’d lived _together_ —which suddenly felt brand new.

#

Eliot sat naked on the bed, leaning against the headboard. Their white top sheet was draped over his lap; _Quentin_ was draped over his lap, wet mouth on his, gasping. He slid his hand slowly up the broad planes of Quentin’s back, feeling Quentin push back against him. Quentin’s hands cupped his face and Eliot curled his fingers in Quentin’s hair, holding him to the kiss, while his other hand jacked him off in long, slow strokes.

Quentin shook with every pull. His thighs worked, hips rolling. His entire body begging for more: more pressure, more speed; more of something, more of everything. He groaned against Eliot’s mouth and it wasn’t even a kiss anymore, just the two of them breathing against each other’s mouths.

“I want you to go down on me,” Eliot said. He bit Quentin’s lower lip, then soothed the sting with another bite. He settled the palm of his hand over the nape of Quentin’s neck and pushed lightly; not so much that Quentin couldn’t pull back, just enough to thrill him.

It had taken a while to work it out, but he’d learned that Quentin liked to be _handled_. He liked to have choices eliminated, so that he knew what Eliot wanted without having to guess. He liked the contrast of small touches and rough ones; for Eliot to push his hair back behind his ear before leaving a biting kiss on his neck; gentle hands on his neck and shoulders before Eliot’s cock pushed into his mouth; a fingernail scratching up the outside of his thigh before he got fucked. He liked to beg and be denied.

Eliot had fucked people whose kinks made Quentin’s look like the dictionary definition of boring, but together they’d walked a line between completely vanilla sex and something very subtly darker. That gray area had been so exciting for so long.

But that was all memory-Quentin, Eliot thought, intrigued. This Quentin might be different.

It would only be scientific to try everything again. Research, sourced on Quentin’s skin and cited in the noises he made when Eliot touched him. An investigation into the differences a year made. He should make a list, be thorough, be _oh so considerate_ —

Later.

Quentin pushed the sheet back. He wiggled himself down to lie between Eliot’s thighs, looking up at him. Eliot could catalogue everything else he wanted to do, there would be plenty of time. _After_ he finished with Quentin, who apparently needed to be reminded that holding the head of Eliot’s cock to his bottom lip while his gaze went distant and thoughtful was a surefire route to trouble.

Eliot put his hand in Quentin’s hair and thought he would be generous this time. This time was a freebie. It had been a while, maybe Quentin had forgotten.

“Quentin,” he said, voice low and rough. “You shouldn’t tease, unless you want what happens when you tease.”

Quentin startled back into the moment. He seemed almost surprised to be holding Eliot’s cock. “Oh,” he said. “I mean, sure—of course—but I was just thinking. Was that window always there? I don’t remember that dresser, either. And I’m pretty sure we had softer sheets. I just keep getting thrown by the differences between then and now, you know?”

“I’ll help you focus,” Eliot said, and wrapped his own hand around himself, his other hand on Quentin’s cheek, thumb dragging at his bottom lip. Quentin rolled his eyes, but the creases at the corners were deep, his smile warm and amused, until Eliot pushed shallowly inside.

They paused, looking at each other. Eliot ran his hand down Quentin’s throat, feeling the rasp of his stubble, the steady thump of his pulse. “Are you with me?” he murmured. Quentin swallowed, his lashes dipping. Eliot held onto the nape of his neck, so lightly; said, “Good, finally,” and pushed deeper inside, deeper, until Quentin closed his eyes and bowed his head, hair falling forward, and—fuck— _good_. _Finally_.

As much as he’d learned of what Quentin liked—the favor had been returned. Quentin knew how he liked his blowjobs: slow, and messy, and noisy. No letting Quentin hide anything, no holding back. Meanwhile Eliot would be cool. He’d keep his control as long as possible, playing languid or even disinterested until it got annoying. Until Quentin rolled his eyes and pulled back. Until Quentin said, “Is this any good, because I could get up if like, I’m boring you.”

“Maybe if you fingered me a little,” Eliot said, magnanimous. He pushed Quentin back and slid down the bed until he was reclined, pulling all of their pillows under his back and head, to give himself a good view.

“I forgot that you’re the worst,” Quentin said. His look at Eliot was so tenderly amused that Eliot’s breath caught in his throat.

“I forgot that you’re lazy,” he said in return. He pulled Quentin into a soft kiss, both of them smiling, before he pushed Quentin back down. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.

Quentin sighed at him but went. He settled his shoulders under Eliot’s knees, one forearm by Eliot’s hip. Eliot had forgotten that the solid width of Quentin’s chest and arms between his legs made him look even longer and lankier. Quentin’s mouth closed back over him, riding down slowly to the root of his cock. Quentin’s fingers worked the sigil for lubricant, and—

Yes, Eliot thought, half-closing his eyes. He let his hips roll up. This was what he’d been wanting: even when he’d turned Quentin down and told himself it was for the best, he’d still been wanting this. The perfect fit of the way they fucked each other. That walk in gray places where both of them found satisfaction. Quentin’s fingers inside him, pressing against his prostate, his eyes watering when he went too deep on Eliot’s cock. Quentin’s own arousal ostentatiously ignored until, until.

The orgasm dragged out of Eliot slowly. It built while he twisted his hips, experimenting with what Quentin could take, was willing to take, until Eliot couldn’t take it anymore himself. He sat half-up, pushing Quentin back until he had just the head in his mouth and Eliot could jerk himself, riding Quentin’s fingers, which crooked just right. He locked his hand in Quentin’s hair, staring into his eyes as he came. Quentin let him see it in his mouth, eyes wide and soft on his.

Eliot took only a moment to recover, to catch his breath, before he pushed Quentin over on his back.

“Not bad,” he said, giving Quentin a wicked grin. He brushed Quentin’s mouth with his thumb to feel how used it was: spit-slick and hot. He straddled Quentin’s hips, rubbing his softening cock against Quentin’s, still hard and red and wet. “You didn’t get yourself off? I’m not sure I’m in the mood now. You should have thought of that.”

“Eliot,” Quentin complained. He tried to move his hips. Eliot sat down on him harder, playing with their cocks—lightly enough not to bother his, oversensitized as it was; lightly enough to have no chance of getting Quentin off. “Jesus, if I’d remembered this part of sleeping with you—”

“You wouldn’t have lasted a week without begging me to come back to your bed,” Eliot said confidently. He leaned down, stretched out over Quentin, heavy on him, covering him from chest to thigh.

Quentin’s eyes immediately went vague. His whole body relaxed into Eliot’s warmth and weight. When Eliot thrust against his belly, against their cocks trapped between them, Quentin made a low, shocked noise. He turned his open mouth up for a kiss. Eliot kissed him, a hand under his head, knotted in his hair. He rubbed, and whispered, and Quentin begged him, frustrated and delighted to be begging. It was beautiful. 

It was always so beautiful.

Quentin went quiet. His hips shuddered and jerked like his orgasm was electric, almost pained. He spilled wet against their bellies. Eliot pushed languidly, spreading the mess everywhere, covering as much of Quentin as he could while the spring suns set and the soft golden-green light of the cottage faded around them. The walls disappeared, and the windows, and the bed, and—

#

He woke up on the ground. Leaves crunched under his head. The sand of the mosaic was chilly and wet under his back. Quentin wasn’t with him—no, there he was, fingertips twitching against Eliot’s.

Meg, Maggie, Isadora, and Will crouched over them. They watched Eliot and Quentin wake up with various degrees of interest, concern, and amusement. Eliot looked at them all, laughed, and turned his head to look at Q.

Quentin looked back at him, that same tender amusement in his eyes. He was smiling. He curled his fingers against Eliot’s, holding his hand.

“So what was it?” Meg asked, poking Eliot in the side with her cane. “The two of you just went white and dropped to the ground like your strings had been cut—what was Daddy’s spell?”

“A last chance,” Eliot said. “An opportunity to get something right.”

“And did you get it right?” Will asked. He cocked his head and stared at Eliot, who shrugged his shoulders, feeling lighter than he had in _so long_. Will hummed an interested noise. "And are you sure that's all the spell was for?"

“We started to,” Quentin answered him, not looking away from Eliot’s eyes. Eliot pulled his hand close, kissed his knuckles.

“Ask us how it went in fifty years or so,” Eliot said. He sat up, pulling Quentin with him, dragging him into a kiss.

#

Snow crunched under their boots. Eliot pulled his cloak more closely around himself, tucked his chin into his scarves. He carried three white flowers in his hands. Quentin, walking silently beside him with his hood pulled up over his head, held a piece of fabric wrapped around something hard and square.

Eliot opened the gate and held it for him. Quentin went through without hesitation, as if he knew exactly where to go.

Their headstones were simple, carved granite. Their names—their assumed names, their family names—and an estimate of their ages. Christ, Eliot had never expected to get so old. It seemed impossible, unlikely to happen again.

In so many timelines, he’d died so young—they all had, all of his friends from Brakebills—and they were still never quite out of danger. Margo’s wars had escalated under Fen’s furious management, which Margo seemed to _love_ ; the McCallisters were seeking vengeance for the destruction of their siphon and the end of their uneasy pact with the Library; Alice, Penny 40, and fucking St. Nicholas were systematically tearing the Underworld apart in search of Everett; Julia, Kady, and Penny 23 were changing the nature of time travel one bloody trip at a time—

But there was a pocket of calm in Lewiston.

The kids were rebuilding the cottage by magic and by hand, under Quentin’s patient eye. Eliot, for all his complaining, was helping design Quentin’s little Hogwarts. It grew more elaborate with every iteration as he and Quentin thought of things the kids really just _needed_ to know. New people were coming to town, mixing and mingling with generations of Quentin and Eliot’s descendants, building homes, clearing ground for the school. Maggie’s troublemaking ex had taken one look at Will and Isadora, backed by Eliot’s coldest, most regal gaze—powerful, even though he didn't feel much of the monster anymore—and slunk off to parts unknown. Isadora, always in search of someone to rescue, had started courting his wife and winning over his silent, cautious children.

And here, up a green-lined path, under the silence of deep chill, interrupted only by the whisper of snow: the cemetery, where nothing much happened at all.

Eliot swept Quentin under his cloak, standing behind him and wrapping him in a hug. “You were so old,” he teased quietly. “I bet your dick had entirely stopped working by then. What a tragedy.”

Quentin snorted but leaned back. “It worked way longer than yours did. Remember that when you’re feeling a little smug about yourself, El.”

“That was just because of the strength of my frail, elderly appeal,” Eliot said, squeezing him.

Quentin patted his hand and took a step away. He wrapped his own cloak more tightly around his knees, then sank down onto them in the snow. He switched his bundle to one hand and used the other to clear snow off their graves: his, and Eliot’s, and Ariel’s, and Teddy’s. He unwrapped the fabric, layered between some of the more sturdy tiles from the mosaic: blue, rose, white, and green. He set one at the base of each of their headstones, his hands lingering over Ariel and Teddy’s, setting the tiles with a precision that belied the shake of his fingers.

When he was done, he stayed on his knees, staring at the headstones.

Eliot quietly left a flower on each tile, fingers twisting a sigil; the flowers would stay as if planted there until he came to remove them, and bloom crisply until he told them otherwise, delicately white against the cold snow.

Then he rested his hand on Quentin’s shoulder, fingertips squeezing through their layers of outerwear, and waited.

After a while, Quentin looked up at him. His face was dry but his eyes had welled up. Eliot brushed his thumbs to the corners and Quentin blinked, sighed.

“Who would we be without the quest for the seven keys?” he asked. “Do you ever think about it? Would we still be running around, getting into stupid trouble, not—not knowing this about ourselves?”

Eliot hesitated. “I think we’d have found something like this eventually,” he said. He squeezed tighter. “I think it was inevitable. Some things are.”

“Yeah.” Quentin sighed again. He wiped his eyes. Eliot held out a hand and Quentin took it, hauling himself to his feet. He shook out his cloak, snow falling off it. “And some things are the result of long, stupid roads, and lots of difficult decisions. Some things should never happen. Some things are a coincidence and a choice and tragedy and magic.”

“Well,” Eliot said, and he tugged Quentin close, tucking him under his chin and resting a cheek on his hair. Quentin went easily, and they stood by the graveside and watched the snow fall. “Then I guess I’m glad we’re brave enough to choose the same paths.”

Quentin held onto him. His arms wrapped strong around Eliot’s back,holding on tight, while the sun set and dusk fell. “We should come back in the spring,” he said when it was almost too dark to read their gravestones anymore. “Leave some kind of more permanent memorials.”

He took a step back and pulled down his hood, looking up into Eliot’s eyes. “For now,” he said, “I think it’s time to go have dinner with the kids.” So Eliot solemnly gave Quentin his hand and followed him back down the hill, to where the long, stupid road home lay waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's done! What a wild, dumb, soft soft soft ride. <3
> 
> Oh, and I keep meaning to mention that you can find me at giddygeek on tumblr, although my tumblr usage is sporadic and varied, because I am an old and have a small child and am busy. Still, I like hearing from people, and having wild parties all by myself in tags, and so on! 
> 
> I thoroughly enjoyed writing this, and I thank all of you for reading. I hope you enjoyed it.


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